Tomorrow’s smart cities will be cleaner, safer places to live, and radar sensors will play a vital role in creating this better tomorrow. When planning smart cities, among the key challenges are traffic and road safety. Finding a balance between easing congestion, keeping citizens on bikes and on foot safe and keeping the air clean will be key to delivering truly livable cities in the decades to come. Advanced sensors such as radar will be essential to unravelling this puzzle in the coming decades, integrating with AI algorithms to offer predictive accident prevention and traffic management.
Legacy traffic management systems are simply not up to the challenge of delivering improved traffic systems and road safety. Today, almost half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and that figure is projected to rise to 68% by 2050, according to the UN. With almost two-thirds of the human race living in cities, delivering cleaner air and safer streets will be a vital part of building cities fit for tomorrow. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution contributes to 4.2 million deaths a year, while roughly 1.2 million people a year die as a result of road accidents.
To build safer, smarter cities requires sensors, backed by AI, which can ‘understand’ where cars are going, monitoring traffic to offer city planners the intelligence they need to curb congestion, make streets safer and deliver cleaner air. To do this, radar will play a central role as an enabler for the integrated AI systems that will underpin truly smart cities.
Radar makes the difference
Radar has several key advantages when it comes to monitoring traffic, and provides real-time information on traffic and road safety to city planners. To speed traffic through the streets while also keeping citizens safe and cutting emissions, city planners need to know what vehicles are going where, at all times. Unlike traditional roadside sensors and cameras, radar works well in all weather conditions and at any time of day or night, enabling real-time traffic pattern analysis, predictive congestion modeling, and automated incident detection.
Radar systems can classify vehicles and track movement without the privacy concerns of camera-based systems. With the latest systems capable of tracking hundreds of vehicles in real time across multiple lanes and in complex road conditions, and even in heavy rain, fog and snow, they offer city planners a uniquely powerful tool to understand traffic. Combined with AI algorithms, the latest system can not only analyze traffic in real time but manage congestion through predictive modeling. Radar systems can also offer predictive accident prevention, enhanced safety for pedestrians and even route emergency vehicles more efficiently through traffic, helping to keep roads safer.
Keeping pace
Traditional traffic management systems rely on fixed sensors (such as induction loops in the ground) and manual monitoring. Such systems simply cannot keep pace with urban mobility as it grows more complex and cities grow ever larger. Paired with camera systems, these systems have high maintenance costs, limited real-time insights and are prone to data fragmentation and lack of integration between different monitoring systems.
Reliant on static collection methods, such systems lack the AI-driven analytics to make traffic signals predictive, rather than reactive, meaning that it’s difficult for city planners to make the necessary decisions to keep streets safer and air cleaner. This is why radar solutions, combined with AI and edge computing, are so powerful, offering real-time data processing, instant traffic pattern analysis and automated congestion management. Radar will help to keep the streets of tomorrow’s smart cities safe.
Taming Verona’s traffic
Radar traffic monitoring systems are already at work today, showing the potential of the technology to curb accidents, cut congestion and make air cleaner. In Verona, in northern Italy, radar technology is already making a difference at the Porta Nova, a critical road intersection built between 1532 and 1540, which is the main artery for the city with 700,000 inhabitants.
With five entrance lanes and six exit lanes, the intersection has seen high levels of congestion. Now, radar sensors classify vehicles and collect data including traffic volume, queue length, turning movements, and traffic flow patterns. This offers city leaders a visualization of hourly, daily and weekly traffic volume, queue lengths and incidents, helping leaders in the city to curb congestion and keep the roads safer.
A smarter future
Cities are growing and evolving, and the need for intelligent traffic management solutions will grow with them. Traditional solutions based on manual reporting and inductive loops do not offer the scalable, easily integrated data required for the smart cities of tomorrow. Radar will form the basis for truly smart platforms that will allow the cities of the future to connect multiple smart city systems together, analyzing cross-system data for improved decision making and allowing automated, real-time responses to changing traffic conditions. Such systems will be vital not just to easing congestion and improving road safety in smart cities, but also to reducing traffic-related emissions. In the smart cities of the coming decades, radar will be vital to keeping citizens safe.
By Jae-Eun Lee, CEO, bitsensing
