Signal 1:Tracking Pedestrian Traffic to reduce congestion

Source: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/new-ways-of-counting-pedestrians-could-change-city-planning-forever

Traffic congesting is always a problem for cities. But for densely populated cities like New York, not only they need to deal with cars, but also crowds of people walking and biking on the streets. It is not rare to see on NYC’s streets that during peak hours pedestrian are conflicting with right-turn or left-turn vehicles while both sides are receiving green lights. Such conflicts could lead to actual traffic accidents and cause more congestions.

While most of the modern softwares use only vehicle flow to measure congestion, tracking pedestrian traffic could be a new way to reduce congestion. For example, if data are available for how many pedestrians are crossing at a given intersection at a time, GPS can reroute vehicles to avoid the high pedestrian volume.

It could be difficult to implement in the past but not anymore. Possible ways of doing it include implementations of pressure sensors, infrared lenses, and magnetometers. Moreover, the future autonomous driving cars, where sensors can detect pedestrian around the vehicle and data can be shared with other vehicles on the road, could also be a good way to put it in actions.