Google’s AI Is Making Traffic Lights More Efficient and Less Annoying

Seattle is among a dozen cities across four continents, including Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, and Hamburg, optimizing some traffic signals based on insights from driving data from Google Maps, aiming to reduce emissions from idling vehicles..

By Googles preliminary accounting of traffic before and after adjustments tested last year and this year, its AI-powered recommendations for timing out the busy lights cut as many as 30 percent of stops and 10 percent of emissions for 30 million cars a month...

The company is expanding to India and Indonesia the fuel-efficient routing feature in Maps, which directs drivers onto roads with less traffic or uphill driving, and it is introducing flight-routing suggestions to air traffic controllers for Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and northwest Germany to reduce climate-warming contrails...

Traffic officers in Kolkata have made tweaks suggested by Green Light at 13 intersections over the past year, leaving commuters pleased, according to a statement provided by Google from Rupesh Kumar, the Indian citys joint commissioner of police..

Rothenberg says Google has prioritized supporting larger cities who employ traffic engineers and can remotely control traffic signals, while also spreading out globally to prove the technology works well in a variety of conditionssuggesting it could, if widely adopted, make a big dent in global emissions...

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