- [Tal] Traffic lights were invented
about a 100 years back.
Police officers were maneuvering the traffic
with their hands.
Traffic lights were simply an automation
of those police officers.
The first traffic light controllers
had kind of like a dial inside that was turning,
and changing the lights on and off
based on a predefined sequence.
Fast forward to today,
even though most of the traffic light controllers
are digital,
they are simply mimicking the same mechanism.
- [Host] A mechanism that's 100 years old.
Our outdated infrastructure has meant congestion,
lost time, and increased emissions.
But what if you could fix all of that overnight?
- [Tal] We've developed an AI-based platform
that allows us to transform any intersection
around the world
in less than two hours.
- [Host] NoTraffic is part of a movement
to finally bring our cities into the 21st century,
and make them work better for everyone.
- [Tal] See, so now there is no one here,
those guys are waiting at this red light
and that's the middle of the day, right?
Just a pure waste of time.
- [Host] The average American spends
over 50 extra hours a year sitting in traffic delays.
And all those idling cars are an emissions nightmare.
- [Tal] You can think about it today,
the intersections are being managed by primitive devices
that have no idea what's going on.
Let's say that I will give now 30 seconds here,
20 seconds there, 40 seconds there.
And hopefully it will be fine.
Now, imagine we let these devices think and talk.
- [Host] NoTraffic's technology allows
traffic lights to react to what's actually happening
on the street.
In doing that, traffic is eased,
you get time back, and emissions are slashed.
- [Tal] The entire idea at the end of the day
is to move as many people and goods
from point A to point B.
And the question is, what's the best way to do it?
So our platform is comprised of three main parts.
We have our sensors that collect data,
think about it like the eyes
that we're providing to the intersection.
Those sensors are equipped with various components
including cameras and radars
and that allows the sensors to get rich data.
And the second one is the connected edge compute device.
That's connected to the actual traffic lights.
Think about it like the brain
that we are providing to the intersection.
The target is to enable the best traffic flow
as possible to reduce delay time.
Now this is subject to a lot of constraints.
I know that in a nearby intersection
there is X amount of vehicles,
and a bus is coming from the South,
and 20 pedestrians are waiting to cross.
And in every given second it's running this algorithm
and deciding what would be the next best step to do.
The third component is our cloud management center.
And you can think about this one
kind of as a layer that connects all the dots.
We look at this as one network, as one grid,
because anything that you do
at one intersection is affecting the rest
of the intersections.
The system is working completely autonomously
in order to run the grid in the most efficient way.
- [Host] But efficiency isn't the only outcome.
Making traffic light decisions
in real time also means safer streets.
- [Tal] So we look at the traffic light
as kind of an authority to tell you,
"Hey, you should go now, it's safe".
In the reality what's happened is
that it's not really safe.
And therefore about 40% of the accidents
happen at intersections.
And the reason is that the traffic lights
don't really have any idea
what's happening on the road, right?
All this stuff is being monitored now remotely
from the system and can indicate in real-time
if there is a problem.
- [Host] And early applications are showing
that it actually works.
NoTraffic has rolled out their tech in cities across
California, Ohio, and Arizona, including in Phoenix.
- [Male Newscaster] This is using
some cutting edge technology,
artificial intelligence to actually monitor intersections.
- [Female Newscaster] It can also change lights
to prioritize emergency vehicles,
buses, Lightrail, and pedestrians.
- [Tal] In Arizona, we did a case study
and we show how we can cut
the time that drivers are waiting by 54%,
the time that pedestrians are waiting by 22%.
If we're doing kind of extrapolation for the entire county,
we're getting to really impressive numbers.
Like, we can save more than half a million tons
of CO2 per year.
We can generate more
than a billion dollars in economic benefit,
and we can save more than 90,000 months of delay time.
Let's look for a second at 1908.
All right, Henry Ford introduced
the first commercial vehicle.
A lot of other systems had to be invented.
You need now infrastructure to support it,
convenience stores and gas stations,
and a lot of other stuff
to support those new things on the road.
I believe that we are in the doorstep of a similar era.
We have transformed a car to a computer on wheels,
but in order to achieve real efficiency,
you need to have an entire connected ecosystem
that supports all types of mobility.
That's what we are building here today.
- [Host] Thanks for watching this video
made possible by Ford.
If you liked it, check out Freethink.com
for more stories of people moving the world.