The City of Raleigh Transportation and IT Departments’ Raleigh Traffic goSmart Project has been named a winner in IDC Government Insights’ sixth annual Smart Cities North America Awards (SCNAA).
The awards are designed to recognize the progress North American states and municipalities have made in executing Smart Cities projects, as well as provide a forum for sharing best practices to help accelerate Smart City development in the region.
Winners in the SCNAA illustrate best practice examples of how forward-thinking municipalities are effectively leveraging technology and innovation to offer sustainable, new services and economic opportunities to meet the needs and expectations of diverse communities.
“We are proud of the recognition for the City of Raleigh teams’ innovative use of cutting-edge technology and collaboration between Transportation and Information Technology to improve the safety of the community we serve. The goSmart project demonstrates what is possible when partnerships intersect between departments to solve real-world challenges," said City of Raleigh CIO Mark Wittenberg.
The goSmart pilot project in Raleigh involves a collaboration between the City's IT department and City Transportation, with the goal of using data collected from intersections within the city to enhance traffic planning initiatives. By leveraging deep-learning computer vision models on traffic camera feeds, the project aims to gain a better understanding of turning movements, vehicle trajectories, and overall traffic patterns. These vehicle trajectories are then converted into GIS features, which can be visualized in real-time within the GIS system, enabling geographical analysis alongside other enterprise GIS data. The data collected through this project, including turning movement counts, is crucial for various traffic analysis activities such as assessing real-time congestion and queueing, optimizing traffic signal timing, identifying traffic anomalies, and supporting roadway design projects.
“Our team came together drawing from our individual strengths to demonstrate these cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning technologies,” said City of Raleigh IT Technology Supervisor who worked on the project Chad Foley. “These technologies are readily available but making them usable so that they add value in solving real world problems is a team effort as well as a labor of love. We enjoy working on this project and look forward to scaling it up as this is just the beginning of what is possible. We’re working to build a reusable platform that will support concepts and solutions for a wide range of ideas including and beyond this transportation example. The close partnership between IT and Transportation and the support from the executive level were also keys to this success.”
Winners will be honored at Smart Cities Connect being held May 16-18, 2023, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO. To learn more about the event, please visit https://spring.smartcitiesconnect.org.