Using AI to Change Traffic Lights for Good – NoTraffic CEO Tal Kreisler

NoTraffic offers a digital solution for traffic woes, an autonomous traffic management platform. Tal Kreisler, Co-Founder and CEO of NoTraffic, explains how the AI platform manages traffic lights. He describes how it will reduce congestion, carbon and accidents while increasing traffic flow.

Kreisler came from the finance side of the business. He saw that mobility technology was changing rapidly while traffic management had not changed for over 100 years. He says the ecosystem behind traffic lights needs something new to manage them. Usually, Traffic lights are timed on a fixed grid, disconnected, not dynamic and cannot react in real-time.

“We are transforming low-tech infrastructure to support modern demands,” says Kreisler, “40% traffic accidents happen at intersections.”

NoTraffic, which has offices in Israel and California, offers a whole system to update traffic lights allowing them to communicate information via the cloud and be efficiently controlled.

“We can retrofit an intersection in less than two hours,” says Kreisler. The company calls the system plug-and-play. It connects via 4G, 5G or DSRC.

A connected ‘AI Sensor’ that includes a camera and radar is installed at intersections. Vehicles, pedestrians and other road users are identified and classified by data fusion.

The ‘Optimization Engine’ is connected to traffic light controllers. It aggregates the data and calculates variables and acts as a gateway to the cloud-based software and portal. The Virtual Management Center (VMC) controls the entire platform.

“Our mission to provide an efficient digital network that can be managed with a click of a button,” says Kreisler about the VMC.

He says, with NoTraffic management, the traffic lights respond to dynamic road conditions in real-time. When traffic flows throughout the grid with fewer cars are waiting at red lights – red-light-running can be reduced by 70%. Plus, the digitised infrastructure connects with V2X technology.

Bringing Technology to Real-Time Traffic

NoTraffic is like a giant AI-chess player looking at the board and running hundreds of thousands of simulations that affect the overall game. Moves are analysed and augmented with traffic from other interactions choosing the best scenarios, says Kreisler.

For example, a city can change traffic flow for a night market, baseball game or big event.

“What we need is to bring technology to real-time traffic and look at the platform as a whole,” says Kreisler, “The next interest is in which vehicles get priority.”

He says it is like providing an iPhone with software that can do many things through the SaaS platform. The VMC can provide priorities to different road users, emergency vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, or micro-mobility.

In the future, intelligent intersections will be important to autonomous vehicles because 90% of autonomous vehicle accidents are due to a limited line of sight, says Kreisler.

“If you can have the information of what is coming around the corner, it is much safer. The sensors on an autonomous vehicle can’t detect things that are not in the line of sight. The hardest parts of autonomous driving are figuring out unexpected edge cases such as a car running a red light,” says Kreisler, “NoTraffic will unlock benefits for autonomous vehicles in the future.”

“We are in a position to be a leader in the urban mobility infrastructure.”

NoTraffic is working with many American municipalities. The company is working with Caltrans in Northern California on validating a system on El Camino Real. Also, NoTraffic deploys its technology in Phoenix and Chandler, Arizona.

“As we expand – all the different verticals can work together to reduce congestion, reduce C02, increase traffic flow to make the urban environment better for people no matter what form of transportation they’re using,” says Kreisler.

“It is exciting to bring IoT to a domain that hasn’t changed and to generate values that affect every one of us,” he says, “We get good feedback.”

He gives the example of a traffic engineer in Arizona who said that his wife loved him more after NoTraffic improved traffic.

“We are in a position to be a leader in the urban mobility infrastructure with a huge potential to affect people’s lives,” he concludes.