At any given moment, 660,000 motorists are glued to their smartphones while driving along American roads.
Serious consequences often result from this behavior–traffic deaths are soaring for the second consecutive year after a long decline. But often, this rampant cellphone use brings more mundane annoyances. Spend five minutes driving in any direction, and you’re sure to come across more than one motorist paying rapt attention to the device in his or her hands instead of the road ahead. Nowhere is this more infuriating than at traffic lights, when a text-obsessed motorist sits, oblivious to a green light, and foments a backup of surly fellow drivers. In certain Audi vehicles, this is no longer a problem, with the introduction of new “time to green” technology.
The German car brand launched the new feature earlier this month in Las Vegas. It counts down the time remaining until traffic lights turn green. Displayed on both the instrument cluster and the head-up display, the countdown clock provides real-time wait predictions for drivers interested in remaining attentive behind the wheel.
So far, the feature has very limited distribution. Currently, it only works at traffic lights in southern Nevada and is limited to subscribers to the Audi Connect Prime service, which costs $199 for six months’ worth of access to dozens of connected features. The technology will be available on models of the Audi A4, Q7 and A4 allroad manufactured after June 1, 2016.
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“This is a big deal for us, because we understand that technology is going to disrupt the heck out of transportation.”
– Angela Castro, Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada
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Enough with the qualifiers. Despite the small initial audience, the time-to-green feature breaks significant ground.
For the auto industry, the arrival of time to green on production vehicles marks the first time a manufacturer has deployed a connected feature using vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology on American roads. One in three cars will ship with connected capabilities in the United States by 2020, according to global automotive research firm SBD. With that growth will come a proliferation of similar features, as well as technologies that may eventually be critical to the safe operation of cars.
For Audi, it is the first in a suite of related technologies under development that will comprise the brand’s Traffic Light Information package. A feature that gives motorists an optimal speed to maintain to reach upcoming traffic lights while they’re green is “around the corner,” according to company executives. Another feature will mesh stop/start technology with real-time traffic-light information to reduce fuel usage.
“It’s why connected infrastructure is so important today,” said Rick Whittemore, manager of Audi of America’s connected-vehicle portfolio, “and it will be more important in the future.”
On the Ground Floor of Smart Cities
Launching a V2I product requires close collaboration among private industry, local governments, and transportation authorities. In developing the time-to-green technology, Audi engineers and employees at the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) of Southern Nevada not only laid the technical groundwork for the feature, they sketched a blueprint for how these public-private relationships work.
“This is a big deal for us, because we understand that technology is going to disrupt the heck out of transportation,” said Angela Castro, senior director of governmental affairs for the RTC. “And from that perspective, what does that mean to our community? It is our role and responsibility to educate elected officials and residents about what’s coming, what’s real, what’s hype, and how do we best prepare.”
Las Vegas already finds itself more prepared than most cities for historical, technical, and political reasons.
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“Connected infrastructure is so important today
and will be more important in the future.”
– Rick Whittemore, Audi Connected Vehicles
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Because the city and surrounding area are relatively new, so is the infrastructure. Engineers can harvest data from 1300 traffic signals, 508 traffic cameras, and 504 freeway-flow detectors. Other cities don’t necessarily have that capability. As its name suggests, the Regional Transportation Commission’s purview encompasses Las Vegas, Clark County, and a half-dozen municipalities. That setup allows Audi to work with a single source for the data it needs. In a region like greater Los Angeles, by comparison, Audi executives said they’d need to partner with more than 110 different municipalities to get enough information to cover the region adequately.
Complications won’t stop Audi from eventually seeking data. But as the brand expands Traffic Light Information in cities beyond Las Vegas–executives say there are discussions underway with roughly a dozen more cities—they’ll first look to places that are both rich in data and regionally streamlined.
Here’s How It Works
Cars don’t directly receive traffic-light data from the city. There’s a middle step involved.
Information on the traffic lights’ signal phases is transmitted from a regional traffic-control center in Las Vegas to Traffic Technology Services, a private vendor of traffic systems that uses machine learning to track consistency in the data packets and make projections on wait times. Audi vehicles then receive what amount to highly accurate predictions.
BMW has a traffic-light timer that works in a similar, but not the same, way. An app called EnLighten receives data from another private vendor, Connected Signals, and sends the data to users who have iOS devices. From those devices, the information can be projected from the phone to the vehicle. It’s not a true V2I integration like Audi’s, but motorists may not care about the semantic difference.
Signal-phase patterns can be disrupted when pedestrians press crosswalk buttons or emergency vehicles gain priority access to intersections. When these unexpected changes occur and the system’s confidence in its accuracy falls below a certain threshold, drivers won’t receive a time-to-green countdown. That’s a smarter way to manage the feature than to provide erroneous numbers that would erode driver confidence in the system.
In a half-hour test drive along the Las Vegas Strip and over other main arteries in the city, the system received signal information about 70 percent of the time. At the intersections where a countdown was unavailable, it was impossible to tell whether its absence was due to a lack of information–Audi says time to green is currently functional at roughly roughly 1100 of the 1300 regional intersections—or because the system deemed the available information unreliable.
At the intersections where the countdown occurred, the system worked largely as advertised, with accurate times. When the car first acquired a time-to-green signal, the time would often erratically switch; for example, it would show 44, 43, 42 seconds, then 64, 63, and 62 seconds. But that was momentary. Once it homed in on a time, the countdown would proceed until four seconds remained. At that point, it would disappear, because Audi doesn’t want drivers treating time to green as encouragement to stomp on the accelerator early or T-bone any stragglers through the intersection. By stopping the countdown at four seconds, the company wants to prompt drivers to look up and survey the intersection before continuing their journey.
Location is determined via a GPS signal. Currently, that’s not precise enough to figure out whether a car sits in a left-turn lane or is proceeding straight. Those intentions are determined onboard and based on whether a driver is using the turn signal. Eventually, as cars incorporate new sensors for automated features, that could change.
That could spur further smart-traffic features that are incorporated into navigation systems—and one day help cars offer faster routes to drivers based on the timing of traffic lights. Drivers would benefit; so would cities.
“This is a two-way street, and as more Audi vehicles come onto the network, we’re going to get better information to manage coordination and get to a point where we can choose better routes,” Castro said. “When you ask our residents what they think our issues are for mobility, they say, ‘safety, congestion, capacity.’ This is going to help us, because it costs $6 million to build one mile of roadway. We’d rather invest in intelligent infrastructure instead of throwing down more asphalt.”
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