How Israel’s NoTraffic is Bringing Traffic Lights to the 21st Century

The story of Israel’s NoTraffic began in 2017, when the company’s CTO Uriel Katz was stuck at the traffic lights at an intersection at 2am. The road was empty, but he was stuck for a minute and a half waiting for the signal to turn green. Sitting in the car, he started to wonder why this kind of redundancy still existed.

And so, Katz co-founded NoTraffic along with Or Sela and Tal Kreisler, who are presently the company’s CSO and CEO respectively. Six years on, the trio have put the company on the world map with its pioneering technologies, having even been featured as one of Time magazine's 100’s Most Influential Companies of 2022.

“NoTraffic is a leading mobility platform laying the digital foundation for the future of transportation today,” Matan Nir, Director Business Development & Marketing at NoTraffic, tells Auto Futures.

“Since 1912, when the first controller or signal intersection was invented, there has been very little progress. Back then, they were developed in analogue, which had a timer set to an average of 120 seconds. Even after 100 years, this methodology hasn’t changed. This is the reality of 90% of traffic lights in the world that are still operated on fixed time plans.”

As Nir explains, even today, the timing plans for traffic lights are created by traffic engineers. These engineers go on the field, take an average count on traffic for an average day or weekends and create a timing plan for the controller based on their findings. In most cases, this happens every three to five years.

“Try to imagine how inefficient this is,” continues Nir. “First of all, hiring traffic engineers costs a lot of money. Second, we live in a world that is rapidly changing. What holds true today might not tomorrow, and three to five years is a lot of time. There may be construction on the road, a new line for pedestrians, a new building, a new school, it could be just about anything that could throw a spanner in the works in the way of the plans for that intersection.”

Nir goes on to highlight the three real problems – fixed or predefined timing plans, lack of connectivity, and legacy vertical solutions with limited interoperability.

“The number of vehicles is increasing by the day. Traffic congestion is on the rise, with an increase of 10% annually. Fatality rate has gone up by 10%. Moreover, today, transportation contributes to 25% of emissions. Outdated traffic management systems are a major contributor to these challenges, preventing us from unlocking the potential of advanced mobility solutions. Looking into the future, it is clear that the next generation of mobility depends on signalised grid support, while traffic infrastructure is still trailing behind and remains one of the last domains waiting for its digital transformation."

"With the advent of autonomous technology, autonomous vehicles will need to talk to the infrastructure at some point to get the right information. While a lot of focus and a lot of money was invested in autonomous technology, nobody really picked up the infrastructure side of things. This is where we came in and started to create infrastructure to support the next generation of mobility,” he adds.

NoTraffic - No Problem

By harnessing the power of cutting-edge technology, NoTraffic’s platform makes real-time decisions that impact the physical space.

It provides a single hardware platform with multiple solutions for traffic management. That said, unlike other players in this space, the company isn’t just selling the hardware but the entire ecosystem. When installing different traffic management solutions for different use-cases, customers have to deal with separate hardware from separate companies.

These boxes don’t just crowd the intersection, they aren’t interoperable, don’t talk to one another and come with their individual terms of service based on the solution provider. Instead, NoTraffic’s solution opens up a marketplace of mobility services to its customers once they install the company’s platform in their cities.

“This paradigm shift is fundamentally changing the traffic management industry,” explains Nir.

“Traffic agencies no longer have to deal with complexities of communications, integrations and deployments of multiple devices. Instead, they have access to a fully managed single platform with an unlimited number of mobility applications. Basically, this saves them a significant amount of money and time while also opening new possibilities for traffic capabilities. If an agency is thinking about a new mobility use-case that might help their cities, we are able to do that without them having to buy another piece of hardware.”

Capabilities of the technology includes real time optimisation of traffic lights, the first solution in the world that operates the traffic light solely based on real-time data rather than timing plans. It takes into consideration different types of road users such as emergency vehicles, public transportation, pedestrians, scooter, and cyclists using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and provides a customised priority based on the agency preferences.

Using this technology, NoTraffic has significantly cut down the time that vehicles are spending on the road, which, in some cases, is as high as 70%. This also has a significant impact on reducing CO2 emissions.

The Shift to True Ground Data

NoTraffic's platform is currently in use by dozens of traffic agencies across America, and is projected to reach over 100 agencies by the end of 2023.

While discussions with several countries are actively going at the moment, things are looking very positive for this Israeli startup.

“The goal is to capture the United States in terms of deployment. Comparing this to where we are today, managing 12 intersections or even 50 intersections is never the same as managing the entire city. Our vision is to capture and manage entire cities on a grid level and make these cities more efficient than they are today."

The next stops for the company look set to be Europe, Australia, among other locations. 

“The world is shifting from statistical data to true ground data, and we know we’ll play a pivotal role in all this because we will be there. We will actually have our system out there on the ground and we'll be able to know the truth. Moving forward, our focus will be to develop more applications for the future of smart cities, future mobility, and the private sector, in addition to continuing the work that we’re doing in the public sector space and taking that to a whole new level,” he concludes.