on Elon Musk’s thoughts regarding the use of artificial intelligence to make traffic lights smarter. The problem is that massive amounts of time are wasted at a red light, especially during times when there are few vehicles on the roads. Sometimes, there are glitches where a light will stay red for far longer than it should. I wrote about these issues and Elon’s idea to solve them.
“Having worked at Tesla before and having worked at other automotive companies like Toyota, I’ve worked on the challenge of how do you use vehicle data for traffic and traffic management. It always just blew me away that even with mapping, traffic lights were kind of disregarded. “How do you think it is when an emergency response has to knowingly blow through a light that’s not doing it any service, or someone who’s stuck on a bus?”
“Recognizing that there are all these ways of communicating and operating, I left what I was doing on the automotive side to try to come and help our cities out and get that same data. “We’ve been able to help underserved communities that rely on transit to be able to get to where they need to go 20% faster. We’ve been able to significantly improve emergency response. The thing is not changing the light green–that can be done. It’s knowing when to change the light green. That’s the difference between you waiting 30 seconds and 20 minutes.”
“You’ve gotta go export an Excel spreadsheet in the actual traffic light and take it back to your desk and then look at it all, and by the time you get around to it, it might be months since that data was relevant. So, you can’t really fix things that are happening then unless you’re there.”I asked Timothy if there were plans for expansions to other states besides the West Coast. He explained that there are plans to expand not just within the US, but that LYT is built for international use.