Las Vegas Turns to Edge Computing to Improve Traffic Safety
Across the country, Las Vegas is using Dell’s edge computing software and sensors from NTT to monitor traffic sensors and analyze data to improve road safety, especially on one-way streets. Las Vegas has been testing “new infrared cameras and lidar-based sensors that track movement without identifying individuals behind the wheel or walking and pedaling down the street,” StateScoop reports.
If the city knew how many accidents were occurring, it could potentially change signage and other measures to boost safety.
NTT’s sensors can detect collisions and near misses, using lidar, a laser-based system that measures distance and is often used in autonomous vehicle tests.
“What we’ve found out is while we didn’t have a lot of accidents on a [one-way] street, we did have a lot of people going the wrong way,” Michael Sherwood, IT director for Las Vegas, tells StateScoop. When accidents happen on one-way streets, there is a tendency for city government to want to make a quick fix, Sherwood tells Government Technology. However, that street might not have had a lot of one-way drivers, and other streets may have had more near misses. “So, we’re using edge analytics now to monitor one-way traffic,” says Sherwood.
The NTT sensors, which also collect audio information to help determine cars’ locations, use Dell’s edge computing software to compute the data at the network edge, on the sensor. The city then collects metadata from the sensors and stores it in a central database.
“Instead of sending all the data back to a core, trying to analyze it and send something back, even though that might take milliseconds, it really is not helpful if you’re trying to change a light from green to red based on a condition,” Sherwood tells StateScoop. Edge computing allows the city to make faster decisions and improve traffic safety in real time.
Edge computing is still seen as an emerging technology in many cities, but it really is just taking traditional computing and networking outside of data centers and into the world where residents live and work.
As the technology matures and city governments become more comfortable with it, they can use edge computing to deliver insights about their smart city services faster. That’s something that should be appealing to cities large and small.
This article is part of StateTech's CITizen blog series. Please join the discussion on Twitter by using the #StateLocalIT hashtag.