How AI & ML Are Being Used to Relieve Traffic Congestion
Traffic isn’t just bad. It’s actually getting worse.
Do you think the traffic is bad where you live? Try moving to Boston, where commuters suffer the worst highway congestion in the nation. Residents of the New England city spent an average of 164 hours sitting in their vehicles going nowhere slowly last year, losing as much as $2,291 in personal value for the privilege.
And that’s nothing compared to the city found to be cursed with the worst highway tie-ups on the planet. Moscow commuters are known to have lost an average of 210 hours each last year to traffic jams.
That’s according to the connected car services company INRIX in Kirkland, WA and its annual Global Traffic Scorecard. It’s based on a study of congestion and mobility trends among more than 200 cities across 38 nations. Here in America, the survey found that commuters nationwide spent an average of 97 hours last year stuck in traffic at an average cost of $1,348 per motorist. That comes to a staggering $87 billion lost nationwide to traffic tie-ups.
In response, planners are now leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to relieve traffic congestion.
While there’s no single solution capable of fixing the world’s traffic problems. Every city has a vast and unique set of problems that combine to create congestion and gridlock. Fixing them with AI and ML requires targeted solutions.
Cities today are exploring AI- and ML-driven platforms that are cloud-based solutions that seamlessly connect mobility providers, vehicles, drivers, and travelers in order to optimize fleet performance.
Think of these platforms as a control tower for fleets.
These platforms enable mobility providers to deliver transportation services by providing a large collection of planning, supervision, orchestration, foresight and business intelligence functionalities for hybrid vehicle fleets.
This effort would require oversight from the cities and municipalities themselves, which would leverage third-party platforms to orchestrate the entire system, rather than have it controlled by private providers such as today’s ride-hailing service brands.
Other solutions focus on specific challenges but still have the potential for immediate impact. Take, for example, Miami’s unpredictable drawbridges. It is estimated that commuters spend between 10 and 20 minutes stopped if they have the misfortune of getting stuck waiting for one to open and reset.
All over the globe, solutions to some of today’s biggest traffic problems are coming to life.
