Reducing traffic-related frustration for city residents, enabled by the cloud

This article was originally published on the AWS blog.
 

As communities around the world grow, traffic congestion problems increase. Cities and states in addition to regional authorities face decisions around how to modernize, maintain, and budget for upgrades to their transportation network to improve the quality of life and safety of their residents.

Congestion itself is not the problem, but rather a sign of a city’s prosperity. Economic growth, job creation, and increased mobility are outcomes of a healthy city, state, or region. So as congestion becomes a way of life, how do transportation officials prioritize decisions and measure the results of their efforts to minimize their residents’ frustration? While governments may never fully eliminate traffic congestion, understanding where to prioritize public investment to impact traffic patterns.
 

Making data-driven decisions with Iteris

With private and public sector collaboration, officials can measure and analyze city transportation and congestion to make data-driven decisions that improve the quality of life for their residents. Companies like Iteris, Inc. are using the cloud to create scalable and secure solutions to help agencies improve mobility and make effective decisions for public transportation projects and high-impact events.

“The smart use of advanced technology is the cornerstone of our 2016-2020 Congestion Management Plan,” said Barbara Gray, General Manager, Transportation Services for the City of Toronto. “Getting real-time intelligent transportation system data analysis, visualization, and reporting from Iteris will help us to improve traffic congestion and safety in our city.”
 

Announcing ClearGuide, built on AWS

Iteris recently announced the release of ClearGuide, a solution that delivers transportation analytics that derive insights from current and historical data. Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), ClearGuide delivers real-time views of major congestion issues in an easy-to-use interface. By identifying problem areas with data, public agencies can understand the root cause of congestion and quickly apply resources to improve their users’ commute.

“With Iteris ClearGuide, transportation agencies of any size can optimize their mobility operations using real-time, historical, and contextual transportation analytics to identify problem areas and their root causes, and ultimately, improve safety and mobility for all road users,” says Ramin Massoumi, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Transportation Systems for Iteris.

“By building on AWS, our customers’ data is hosted in a highly available and secure infrastructure,” says Scott Perley, Vice President, Transportation Systems for Iteris. “AWS provides an amazing set of tools that allow us to keep innovating in new and dynamic ways. These tools allow us to provide services to transportation managers that provide easily accessible data that help them to truly understand their transportation efforts and make improvements in the day-to-day lives of so many of their residents.”

ClearGuide provides maps to support traffic operations and bottlenecks to identify and help mitigate congestion. Users can access animations to analyze events and optimize response plans, along with historical trend and user-defined route reports, maps, and congestion charts to track reliability and support planning. ClearGuide also offers dynamic route creation for easy analysis of any route across the United States.

“With both real-time and historical data from Iteris, our traffic operations, engineers, and planners will have access to actionable insights that will support their operations and planning activities, as the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) continues its mission to improve the performance of the state’s roadways,” says Rob Perry, Traffic Engineering Director for SCDOT.

Learn more about AWS for transportation.