Page 45 - GCN, June/July 2018

case study SMART CITIES
Solving DC’s gridlock
with smart cars and
traffic signals
Officials are teaming up with a car manufacturer to share real-world data that could improve the flow of traffic
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
Adata-sharing partnership be- tween the District Department of Transportation in Washing- ton, D.C., and automobile manufacturer Audi of America has the potential to help the nation’s capital ease its notorious traffic congestion.
“The data that we are sharing with Audi in this case is our signal system in- formation in real time,” said Soumya Dey, associate director for traffic operations and safety at DDOT. “What we want to get from Audi in return is the information about how long their vehicles are stop- ping at specific intersections.”
The Traffic Light Information vehicle- to-infrastructure (V2I) system, built in partnership with Traffic Technology Ser- vices, enables select 2017 and 2018 Audi models to communicate with the city’s traffic signal infrastructure. Drivers of those vehicles who have also subscribed to the Audi Connect Prime information and navigation package will be able to see on their dashboards or heads-up dis- plays how long they must wait for the light to turn green at about 600 intersec- tions in the District. The company plans to implement the system at all of the Dis- trict’s 1,650-plus traffic signals, Dey said.
When one of those Audi models ap-
proaches a traffic signal, it receives real- time information from the traffic man- agement system that monitors signals via an onboard 4G LTE data connection.
“We’re providing the data to a database on a real-time basis, and [Audi is] grab- bing it as fast as we populate the data- base,” said Harvey Alexander, manager of intelligent transportation systems mainte- nance at DDOT. His department reviews, assesses, integrates and implements
the latest technologies to enhance the district’s transportation infrastructure.
Although DDOT updates data once per second, it takes about three seconds for the data to come from the field to DDOT’s server. “I would expect that there’s some- where in the neighborhood of a five-sec- ond latency built into it,” Alexander said.
Wasim Raja, associate director of DDOT’s Traffic Engineering and Signals Division, can incorporate the data into
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PHOTOS: AUDI