How Google is reducing traffic and emissions using AI
Google's use of artificial intelligence to help cut pollution and traffic jams
The experience of being trapped in traffic and having to run many red lights in succession is not only aggravating and detrimental to one’s stress levels, but it is also detrimental to the environment. To address this issue, however, a city in the United States is receiving assistance from a major technology company and artificial intelligence.
Juliet Rothenberg, who works for Google, is on a quest to improve the efficiency of traffic signals and make them less difficult to use.
“Shift a few seconds from here to there and that shift can have a big impact,” according to her CBS News interview.
The new Project Green Light system from Google makes use of the massive mapping database and artificial intelligence of the corporation to improve traffic signals all across the world. It is up to the city engineers to determine whether or not they wish to make the improvements that are suggested by the system.
According to Laura Wojcicki, an engineer with the Department of Transportation in Seattle, “We had one case where we moved four seconds from a north-south street to an east-west street for a particular time of day, so then that can help reduce some of that stop-and-go traffic,” she said in an interview with CBS News.
According to her, a recommendation from Google’s system may be included in the system in around five minutes.
Even though Seattle is the first city in the United States to test out Project Green Light, the program is now being evaluated at 70 intersections in 13 cities across the world, which will affect 30 million automobile trips each month. According to Google, the idea has the potential to cut stop-and-go traffic by as much as 30, percent.
According to her, the acceleration of vehicles after they have stopped is responsible for fifty percent of the emissions that are produced by vehicles at junctions. Google estimates that it can lower those emissions by ten percent, which would be a welcome reduction given that transportation is the primary source of pollution that contributes to the warming of the earth in the United States.
“Intersections are a really good leverage point for tackling climate,” according to Wojcicki.
As part of what it refers to as a “green wave” for drivers, Google offers the service at no cost and has ambitions to spread it to thousands more locations before it is fully implemented.
