“Porta Nuova in Verona, Italy, is the result of then-modern city planning—in the year 1532. The gateway to the city, and its elaborate fortifications, was designed by Michele Sanmicheli, the Renaissance military architect who built fortresses in Crete, Cyprus, and Venice. Those thick walls are still standing, but Porta Nuova is now equally known for stubbornly blocking armies of cars, scooters, buses, bicycles and other traffic. Basta!

Now, an AI system of camera-and-radar sensors could help Verona unsnarl Porto Nuova traffic, gathering data to ultimately improve road safety and reduce carbon emissions. The technology comes from Bitsensing, a South Korean company founded in 2018 by automotive radar experts, in a joint project with the City of Verona and Italy-based Famas Systems…

Data is shared through a secure central router and displayed in a user console through Bitsensing’s ‘TraXight’ software. Its dashboard displays hourly, daily, and weekly charts of traffic-and-pedestrian volumes, flow, overall statistics and event detection. The result, Lee said, is actionable information sent to operators at the City of Verona—population 700,000—that doesn’t require deep technical knowledge.

‘With this analysis, planners can put in place mitigation measures informed not by guesswork but by data, such as expanding roads, changing traffic light timing, and rearranging the road composition, so that traffic congestion is solved,’ Lee said.”

From IEEE Spectrum.