Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Nobody likes traffic. It’s slow and miserable. The source of many a driver’s rage as they waddle through gridlocked highways, reaching the end of the road, only to be confronted by a red light. As you sit there waiting for what feels like a few more hours, a single scooter buzzes by. Is there a single soul on this planet that enjoys the gaze of a traffic light? Even though they exist as a means of ensuring the safe flow of traffic. They end up being little more than obstacles on the path to our destinations.
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Where Did They Come From, and Where Will They Go?
Traffic lights are a part of everyday life, but have you ever wondered how they started? Let’s take a look at their journey from the past to the present.
Dimly Lit Nights
Long before automobiles roamed the land, humanity had to get by using the old horse and carriage. Much like any form of transportation, the more of these that were on the road, the more congested things became. Enter John P. Knight, a talented English inventor from the 1800s. While he was someone who mainly turned his attention to the railway, Knight’s crowning achievement was the invention of the humble traffic regulation system, aka the pioneer of the traffic light.
Knight invented this system in 1866 during a tumultuous time when an estimated 1,102 people were killed and a further 1,334 were injured on London’s foggy roads due to horse-drawn carriages (and here we thought elf-driving Teslas were bad). Knights system was fascinating in that it used gas-lit lamps that would glow red and green during the night, inspired, of course, by his time on the railroad. The very first of these lights was installed on Westminster Bridge on 9th December 1868.
However, due to their flammable nature, tragedy struck a year later when one of the lanterns exploded, injuring its operator. Of course, due to this, the system fell out of favor.
Being Given the Green Light
However, all hope was not lost, for you see, a few decades later, just across the Pacific, a man by the name of Lester Wire would carry on Knight’s legacy in Salt Lake City, Utah. Wire would make it so that the traffic lights, rather than being powered by gas, would be run by electricity. This would allow for them to be much safer and cheaper to use than the original gas-powered ones.
William Potts would go on to refine the Wires idea even further, however, bringing the humble traffic light to what we know it as today. Potts was a police officer who lived around the age of the automobile. Unfortunately for him, keeping up with the era of traffic was becoming increasingly difficult. Operators still manually controlled the lights, and the red and green timing changed too quickly for drivers. Potts had the ingenious idea of adding a third color to the mix, yellow. Alongside this, he made it such that traffic lights could be both automatic and easier to operate on 4-way streets. Ushering in the age of the modern traffic light.
So, What Do These Lights Have to Say?
Traffic lights issue simple instructions to vehicles at specific times to ensure safe and equal traffic flow across roads. Yet this simplicity becomes an obstacle when you realize that a traffic light is just an on-and-off switch functioning at set intervals. It doesn’t know or care for an empty road. All it cares about doing is acting as a simple signal.
But what if there was more to it? What if we gave traffic lights a means of thinking? What if we gave traffic lights a means of making quick yet precise judgments, ensuring traffic passes safely and efficiently? Enter the “smart” traffic light.
What Is a Smart Traffic Light?
The explosion of AI-driven content since the 2000s has led to countless innovations, including machine learning technologies in traffic lights. A smart traffic light is a system of traffic lights that uses algorithms, patterns, complex networking, and AI to train traffic lights. They differ from normal traffic lights, which function based on timed triggers, due to their training.
The training provided to smart traffic lights can optimize the routing of vehicles and pedestrians, which is simultaneously safe and efficient. The training provided to smart traffic lights is based on real-world data and communicated across an array of multiple lights rather than one singular traffic stop. In doing so, all lights within a given radius work together in harmony.
The Key Benefits and Features of Smart Traffic Lights
Smart traffic lights have a suite of unique benefits that make them overall better than the lights we use today.
- They come equipped with multiple sensors, cameras, and a GPS to keep a finger on the pulse of ongoing and incoming traffic. Smart traffic lights have a dynamic signal cycle that adjusts to different types of traffic. For example, during rush hour, the lights may remain green for longer periods in busy directions or shorten red lights when traffic is low.
- The system is also built to understand what vehicles deserve priority over others. You wouldn’t want an emergency vehicle such as a fire truck or ambulance to be stuck in traffic now, would you?
- Due to smart traffic lights being in an interconnected system, multiple lights can synchronize in a way that causes multiple stops to be green, ensuring that traffic has an easy, steady flow. This system ensures that demand is met efficiently across the board and that nobody feels slighted in their daily commutes by an unfavorable stop.
- Smart traffic lights are energy efficient. Whereas normal traffic lights need to be on at all times, smart traffic lights are aware that during certain periods of the day, there are usually no cars and can thus turn themselves off to save on power. Carbon emissions could go down as much as 32% in certain stops.
If Smart Traffic Lights Are So Good, Why Don’t We See More Of Them?
Smart traffic lights have one major hurdle when it comes to implementing them in modern society. The said hurdle is infrastructure. Normal traffic lights are built around roads, and those roads are built around traffic lights. This results in a tightly knit concrete web that’s hard to untangle and even harder to dismantle. Integrating smart traffic lights would require lots of time, effort, and especially money. To top it off, most people may feel unsafe having their every move monitored and analyzed by a robot that lives under the heel of the government. Lastly, while implementing the AI and having it do its task may seem simple, real humans need to carefully monitor and maintain the lights to make sure nothing malfunctions.
The future of these devices is still bright. So long as technology continues progressing at the pace that it is in due time, we can and will see a global effort to adopt this system of traffic control.
When They Say Go, You Go Right Away
With all of this being said, we may have to deal with heavy traffic jams for a while longer. But fortunately, the wait isn’t comparable to the agony of sitting in line waiting for the light to change. We can rest easy knowing that, just like the horse and carriage, future generations may forget that traffic jams were ever a thing. Until then, I hope that after reading this article you come to have an appreciation for that cheeky lamp blinking red, yellow, and green on your merry way!
For more news and developments on smart traffic lights, remember to visit Inside Tech World!
FAQs
- Will I ever see smart traffic lights integrated into my city?
Although it depends on where you live, the explosion of AI-driven technology and the rapid development of said technology have led to a more globally tech-savvy world. In a perfect world, every country on the planet will have some form of smart traffic technology.
- Would such technology work with self-driving cars?
Yes! Self-driving vehicles already depend on other vehicles’ self-driving capabilities to optimize how they drive. With the implementation of smart traffic lights, a greater synergy can be created between vehicles and traffic monitoring, making roads much safer.
- I fear the government will use this technology to spy on its civilians. What can we do to ensure that this won’t happen?
Of course, there is never a guarantee that any government won’t take advantage of monitoring systems through smart signals, but to strive for a world where this isn’t the case, we need a strong foundation of trust between both civilians and those maintaining these signals. Only as everyone is on the same page can we progress towards a less congested world.
