U.K. Government Plans To Reduce Traffic By Opening Up Data To AI Firms

The U.K. government is waging a war on traffic. Yesterday, it announced plans to open up data on congestion, repair works and any other scheduled disruptions to Britain’s road network. The aim? To make this data accessible to any technology firm that wants it, enabling such companies to develop AI-powered apps that provide drivers with not only real-time traffic info, but also ahead-of-time info.

Traffic is an economic disease, and as a problem it’s being made more acute by the growing number of vehicles on the road. In the U.K., motorists lost 178 hours to road congestion in 2018, costing £1,317 per person and setting back the U.K. economy almost £8 billion overall. It’s this kind of cost that the British government is trying to reduce, having announced a review of the legislation surrounding Traffic Regulation Orders (TRO), which define just how temporary roadworks or network changes can be organized and managed.

In the event that the necessary legislation is successfully introduced, technology firms will find it much easier to access data on the 50,000 road closures that are predicted to occur this year. On top of this, the government expects that releasing TRO data will facilitate the development of autonomous and self-driving vehicles, giving such vehicles the data necessary to their route planning systems.

“As a road user, there is nothing more frustrating than discovering roadworks and getting stuck in traffic jams,” said George Freeman, the Minister for the Future of Transport. “Today’s announcement will help open up data, reducing congestion, pollution and frustration for road users.”

This is encouraging news for the future of road technology, and in concert with other similar developments elsewhere in the world, it strengthens the possibility of a world where the combination of AI and big data will make roads safer and less stressful places.

For example, professional services firm EY revealed in February that it was planning to ease Dublin’s congestion problems by implementing Surtrac, a traffic management system developed by Carnegie Mellon-offshoot Rapid Flow Technologies. Having already been introduced in various locations in the United States, it works by coordinating traffic lights, giving more ‘green time’ to junctions with more congestion. In Portland, Maine, for example, it has managed to save drivers around 156 hours a day–or as many as 41,000 hours per year–on a single intersection.

Something very similar is about to be launched in Mumbai, India. The state government has provided around $124.6 million for the installation of an Intelligent Traffic Management System, which will comprise 4,705 smart traffic signs and will cover 617 traffic junctions in the Indian city. Much like Surtrac, the new system will autonomously operate traffic lights according to congestion levels, and according to Madhukar Pandey, Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), it will require minimal human involvement. “The ITMS will come up at all junctions in the city and involve traffic signals, sensors and software. We will be able to optimise the use of space and speed,” he told The Indian Express.

But while it looks fairly inevitable that intelligent traffic management systems will come to every major city in the developed world, these won’t be without certain disadvantages. In the case of AI-powered navigation apps, it’s quite likely that these may reduce traffic in one overloaded spot of town by routing it somewhere else. This is what has been reported to happen with such apps as Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, which have been shown to recommend shortcuts through what had once been sleepy, traffic-free suburbs.

The crowding of formerly quiet neighbourhoods may be something that the U.K. government and its new plans end up inadvertently causing. At the same time, the increased reliance on management systems and traffic cameras like Mumbai’s may make cities and nations more vulnerable to paralyzing cyberterrorist attacks, since as the already long history of hacking road signals and connected cars indicates, some systems aren’t as secure as they should be. Still, assuming that researchers and developers do succeed in securing the cybersecurity of intelligent road networks, we could one day find that severe gridlock becomes a thing of the past.