AI in Traffic Management – How NoTraffic is solving Traffic Congestion? | Tal Kresier (#034)
Chapters:
- Personal Journey [03:53]
- NoTraffic – Solving traffic congestion challenge [12:16]
- How NoTraffic solve the city’s problem? [15:10]
- Compatibility and Interoperability issues with traditional traffic system [25:39]
- Use of AI and ML to adapt to different traffic scenarios [33:05]
- No Homework policy for cities [35:50]
- Transit Signal Priority (TSP) to improve the efficiency of public transportation [42:50]
- Autonomous mobility – Future of traffic signals [51:16]
- Key Entrepreneurial Lessons and Finding the Right Co-founder [56:45]
- Lessons learned during the fund-raising process [59:48]
- Future of Urban Mobility and Traffic Management in the next decade [01:03:55]
Complete Transcript:
There is a path until we get to a fully autonomous environment, right? But we are going through this hybrid environment for the next 10-20 years, I don’t know how many years, right? Which we’re going to have many types of vehicles connected – not connected, autonomous – not autonomous, pedestrians, all these type of things that somehow we need to operate together. This is what we call the transition phase. And in X amount of years we’re going to get supposedly to a fully autonomous era. Now even then, you still need to have something that will decide who is going first and that will implement the city’s policies.
So the theory about this kind of era is that you’re going to have the similar concept to an air traffic controller. You not necessarily need the traffic light itself. If you think about it, the traffic light today is the communication that allow, for instance, our system to tell you as a driver, hey, you can drive or you should stop. You want to interpret this information with your eyes, you understand, Hey, it’s green, I can drive. Red – I need to stop. When you move to a fully autonomous era, you not necessarily need to have these lights. You can use it, you can use communication, but essentially the idea is who is going first and what kind of policy I want to implement because again, the policy is up to the operators to decide.
Welcome to the Mobility Innovators podcast.
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Mobility Innovators podcast. I’m your host – Jaspal Singh. Mobility Innovator Podcasts Invite key innovators in the transportation and logistics sector to share their experience and future forecast. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the importance of AI to optimize the traffic network.
Our today guest is the co-founder and CEO of NoTraffic. NoTraffic is a company that focused on developing technology for intelligent traffic management and optimization system. As a CEO, he managed a large team of industry leader from various fields such as AI, Machine Vision, Cybersecurity, Engineering, bringing the team together in creating the most sophisticated traffic management platform
Prior to NoTraffic, Tel was a business analyst at beta finance consulting firm where he led complex project in the transportation infrastructure and energy industry.
I’m so happy to welcome Tel Chrysler, Co-founder and CEO, NoTraffic. Now it’s time to listen and learn.
Hello Tel, it’s a great pleasure to have you on the show. I’m looking forward to our discussion on the future of mobility and NoTraffic journey.
Hey, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Great. So I would like to kickstart our discussion, your personal journey and like I mentioned, I’m very curious about your journey so far.
You did your bachelor’s degree in LLB and business and accounting from Richmond University. And your professional journey is very interesting as you work in a different role in different industry ranging from project manager in Rafale advanced defense system later security officer, the Royal Caribbean, and after that business analyst with Beta Finance. And then you co-found this NoTraffic company with other two co-founder. And I tell people setting up transit startup or I would say a mobility startup is very difficult.
So I’m very curious to learn what motivated you to launch NoTraffic and I think the meaning is very clear, NoTraffic, you hate traffic. And why did you pick these different careers over the period of time?
Something very interesting why you went through all different paths?
Great. So I think that I kind of started in early days using elimination in a way. So I knew it’s going to go to the business, some kind of a business aspect. I didn’t know what exactly. I knew that I don’t want to be a doctor and I don’t want to be doing some kind of the other domains. So I knew I want to go to something around financial or something like that, but I didn’t know exactly what it is. So this is how it’s kind of evolved essentially I went to school to university and I studied business law and accounting, not because I wanted to be a lawyer or an accountant, but because I thought it’s a great toolbox for anyone that wants to do business. And I think that’s essentially law in accounting. It’s kind of like the basic that the fundamentals or the infrastructure of any entity out there. So no matter what business you want to go to, it’s good to have this kind of a toolbox.
So that was kind of the idea. I had no idea what I’m going to do with that. I just knew it is going to be helpful one way or another and therefore when I kind finished university, I could have go and do internship in some of the big law offices or accounting, et cetera. But I heard about a few partners that left one of the biggest accounting offices in Israel and opened up their own consulting firm dealing with a lot of what back then seems super cool to me. Due diligence and valuation studies and feasibility studies. So a lot of finance from the government side, public sector, private sector, et cetera. And I thought it’s a great opportunity to join us as the first employee in the company and to have the ability to way to touch or to get a taste in each and every of these aspects.
I have to say that I was super lucky because the people I joined to, they wanted to establish the company. I think they are amazing people and today we are good friends and fast forward after a few years in that company. I’ve kind of seen them coming with a spark in their eyes every morning so they really like what they’re doing. On the finance part, I didn’t have the spark so I knew I need to go and do something different. I want to become motivated every morning like they are. So again, I thought it’s cool, I’ve tried it, I have great final, I was super lucky. I think that I’ve got the best experience in the world, just that I kind of understood that I need to go to a different path and this is kind of where I left that company, better finance and I met or well accidentally through a mutual friend, but until today working with us, none of us is coming from the traffic management side and one of my co-founders and our CTO, he was actually stuck sitting at the intersection in the middle of the night was 2016 or 2017 and he was kind of frustrated why these systems are so inefficient now.
Back then he was working for a cybersecurity company, he came from the tech side, so since he’s 14 he was doing tech and as engineer, he was just starting to think how can we do it differently? How can we do it better?
Few, I think it was about a year after or something like that the companies that he was working for was acquired by IBM and then he had the chance to go out and do something different. He decided not to stay, he got interesting offers to stay working for IBM and he decided to leave and he decided to start to work on this traffic management thing myself and all the failed co-founders joined him. We just thought it’s an interesting idea. We had no idea whatsoever about traffic management.
We kind of just started to do kind of market research and started to dive in and we kind of realized there’s a massive domain with so much impact on the physical world, which it’s just mind blowing. However, this domain have not changed for such a long time and the things that new technology, new methodology can do in this sector is, I would even say it’s kind of similar to transforming vehicles to driving without a driver. It’s massive impact. So we just saw kind of massive opportunity there and we started to work on it. I would say by the way, if we were coming from this domain, we probably not starting the company then we will probably realize how complicated things are. But when you don’t know, sometimes it’s a great advantage because you just die. You jump into the water and you simplify things.
And the number of times that we heard about things that are impossible or it will never be going to work, I cannot even count these times and I’m kind of proud to say, when you’re coming with no limitations in your mind about things and you look at the problem, you kind of specify the problems. Specifically we want to transform all the traffic lights to a one holistic connected network that operates in real time and sell different types of road users based on different types of policies and preferences and events. And how do you do that? So you’re missing communication, you’re missing data, you’re missing compute power. You need to have a holistic system that will take the decisions. You’re starting to break down the components and the missing parts and design the solution. Then you kind of overcome all of these challenges that were inherent to this domain and we had no idea that it’s such a big thing.
That’s very true. Coming from outside the industry, you come with more opportunity and you come with the possibility and you work in that industry, you come with a limitation. You say like, this is not possible. Somebody tried it, it never happened. The legal, the regulation will never happen. But if you come from outside, you say why they’re not changing. Why they’re not bringing those change.
Exactly. And I think by the way, it’s true for a lot of companies that accepted traditional industries, you have someone from the outside that simply come and say. Hey, why are we not doing it in a different way today? We have better tools, better technology, beta capabilities to do things that we could not do a few years ago. So that’s one of the funny story that we had that one of our board members, his name is Nathan Gardner. So he invented the first adaptive system in the world named OPAC Optimization Policies for Adaptive Control and he spent a lot of many years in academia and at some point he came to cities and he said, I can solve your traffic problems. And they said, go ahead. And then he said, all you need to do is to put one mainframe computer in every intersection and then we can start to make it work. Now obviously it was not a real option and luckily today we have these smartphone devices that you can put easily same amount of compute power without the need of these huge mainframe. So things change. We are moving forward and therefore the tools that we can use can open up a whole new world of possibilities.
That’s very true. I mean I think sometime it’s the timing, it’s the right time for idea. And actually that’s my next question is why you think it’s important to build NoTraffic now? What have changed in the market and what exactly NoTraffic do and what’s it missions to transform the traffic management, how it’s working, what is company solving the traffic problem in the city?
Great. So I’ll start by saying that first of all, we need to start to look at things in a more holistic way. Think about mobility notices, like different verticals or different pieces. It’s like a puzzle, but every piece in the puzzle have these connectors that allow you to integrate with the other parts. What’s happened today is that most of the verticals thinking about their own narrow aspect and therefore in the context of a puzzle, it’ll never connect, it’ll never come up together. And this is one of the things that when we are thinking about traffic in general and mobility, we’re thinking about how everything can work together, think how efficient it is when the vehicles are communicating with each other, with the traffic, with the different ride hailing applications, but everything is kind of more holistically. So that’s I would say our agenda at NoTraffic.
We developed a mobility platform that today consider as top in the market and our mission is simply to revolutionize over mobility by developing this leading platform for signalize intersections with the goal of reducing emissions, saving lives and obviously increased efficiency and enable the future of mobility services or the next generation of mobility services I would say. So that’s kind of how we build our product to be able not just to solve different use cases but also be a part of a much bigger picture.
Amazing. Now you mentioned something very important is the life, the accident, the fatality, and also the emission. I think that’s are the two pressing issues right now. We are facing, in fact, when I was studying the data, I found 1.35 million people died in road accident every year and it’s like an airplane crashing every hour. One of the challenges is not about people behavior but also how the traffic system is organized. Second is people are losing 51 hours in traffic jams every year. So it’s kind of two days of your life you’re just wasting, we can use that two days for life to so many other things. So what are some of the key challenge that traditional traffic management system face? Because you mentioned the system hasn’t been upgraded over the period of time.
I think the first traffic light was installed in London in 1860 and nothing has changed much. And how does traffic technology address these challenges? How you are solving which the earlier system couldn’t be able to solve? Other important things, I would like to ask you is if you can share some case studies where NoTraffic has actually led to a improvement in the traffic flow in the city, how you solve the traffic problem in the city.
So first to your first point about the number of fatalities and congestion, et cetera, I think that in order to really solve that, again, it’s a much bigger play. So we need to have much better public transportation and we need to have better infrastructure, better traffic management to support and we need to have the ability to communicate between the different verticals that using the roads and pedestrians, et cetera. So it’s not just like one thing that we’re going to improve and everything is going to be amazing. It’s a much, much, much bigger effort for humanity. Now within this bigger effort there are different stakeholders or different components that should operate together and we are from the traffic management side seeing ourself as de component that should bring this innovation or advancement to enable to all these parts to work together. So the way that we are seeing it is that on the traffic management side, one of the biggest issues is that we are using the same methodology for the last a hundred years or so.
So we’re still using timing plans in a dynamic world or in dynamic environment. So there is not really any, I would say correlation between whoever used the roads and the system that manage these road users. Traffic management systems originally designed for vehicles and now the environment is becoming much more complex. So first all you have both vehicles on the road, but you have also different types of vehicles. You have public transportation, you have emergency vehicles, you have freight, you have different types of objects and then you also have pedestrians and more pedestrians and bicycles and scooters and various types of things that I don’t even know what they are, but it’s something with the wheel or two or three.
And somehow all of these things need to operate together. So there is kind of a key principle that start to be more common, which means that the goal is to move more people and goods from one place to another from Point A to Point B. And by the way, that’s the idea behind prioritization for public transportation that on a single bus you can move more people rather than three vehicles for instance, the average capacity of a private vehicle is 1.2 – 1.3 people per vehicle. In a single bus, you can feed 50 people or so you can put more. And if we’re going to follow this idea of moving more people in goods from Point A to Point B, now the question is how do you do that in the most effective way and how you also take into consideration various things that happening on a daily basis – accident, incident, road blockage, different type of weather, baseball games, protests, tons of stuff that’s going on, right? Construction, since the world is dynamic. And if you think about it in that context, you will get to the point that you need to think about traffic lights not as just a solution that need to change the lights on and off, but as something more holistic that need to operate as a network.
These networks have to communicate between all different nodes, implement different types of policies, who is going first the ambulance or the private vehicle or the pedestrians or the bus. And if the bus is empty, it’s not full and if it’s in the lay of the schedule or if it’s ahead of the schedule, there’s so many interesting questions that you need to take into consideration. And then you come up with a very complex system, it should be how do you implement it, how do you execute this kind of a thing? And then it also need to react to various things. If you have a road blockage it need to identify or to know about it again construction, whatever. So this, that was kind of where we came from and this is what we designed and developed over several years already, a platform that have the ability to retrofit these traffic lights, connect them through the cloud to create a network between different intersections and allow them to operate in a fully automated way based on the policies that’s coming from the operator.
So that’s important to emphasize. We are providing a management tool and we are not policy makers, meaning that any agency can define their own policies and I’ll give you some examples to your question. So some cities wanted to reduce congestion. It’s kind of like the, let’s call it the obvious case, they had a huge queue in a certain corridor and they want to get rid of it. So in a city of Tucson for example, we deployed our system on what we called optimization or automated mode. The corridor is run fully on automatically and it killed a queue of about a mile, right? A queue that was there every peak time – [8:00] AM to [4:00] PM have gone. And that’s because the system is now operating fully autonomously, understanding how many vehicles are there, how many are coming from well and do not work based on timing plans that were predefined now in other cities in another city, the goal was to increase safety for instance, that was the prime world and in that city we managed to reduce the number of red light runners, the vehicles that are crossing the intersection in red light, we managed to reduce it by 70%.
So essentially, we reduced the probability for an excellent by about 70%. So that was their goal. And in a different city their goal was to prioritize pedestrians over vehicles.
That was the policy. And then we managed to cut the pedestrians delay time by close to a half. So pedestrians are waiting less. It’s important to say that we managed to do it without affecting the delay time of the vehicle. So there is kind of this misconception in the traffic space. If you’re prioritizing one certain approach, main street versus side street or pedestrian versus vehicle, then someone else will kind of pay this pay for this deprioritization. It’s kind of a short blanket effect and we managed to prove that it’s not right. So we managed to both prioritize pedestrians or improve dramatically corridor without affecting the side street or without affecting the main street in terms of the vehicles, et cetera. Now it’s important to say that if the goal in the case with the pedestrians was to improve the vehicle’s flow, we could have probably improved it more. But if we look at the base case, where we started from the situation now is much better. Pedestrians waiting less vehicles are waiting less, much better than what was before we came.
That’s amazing. All three case studies and I love your point because the city need to define its subjective. You can’t just say, okay, just solve the traffic problem, but what exactly you want to do, whether you want to reduce, increase the safety or you want to reduce the pedestrian time or you want to reduce the queue. And generally in traditional way, that’s what the thinking was, that if you want to increase the cycle time, you have to take the time from other cycle. So reduce the timing of other, I mean I used to work for Delhi BRT corridor when it was launched and one of the thing Delhi BRT corridor fail in 2010 was the traffic signaling because we couldn’t manage every arm was full, there was so much of traffic and when the Queue formation happened, people tend to do more violation because you became more anxious and you want to be jump the traffic light or you want to run through the traffic light and more accident happened. But the moment you bring some normalcy on the system, things calm down, people became much more patient because they know they were able to clear the traffic soon.
And it’s important to emphasize there are always trade-offs, right? There are always tradeoffs the trade-offs defined by the operator. If now the system need to take a decision, who is going first? You have one pedestrian and one private vehicle, it’s up to the operator to define the priorities and obviously if the pedestrian is going before the vehicle, then there is a trade-off. However, when you move to a real time system in comparison to systems that’s based on timing plans, the improvement for anyone is dramatic. And I think that’s probably the biggest shift that this industry have to go through because things that are based on timing plans in a dynamic world are by definition less effective than system that operate in real time based on what really happening on the road.
I love your word about the dynamic world because that’s very true and we have so many different vehicle in some of the country, like in India we used to have 17 different type of vehicle at the same time on the road like 17 different and in other part of the world also now we have micro scooter, micro mobility bikes, pedestrian cars, autonomous vehicles. So it’s going crazy. Our world is moving in a different direction. So now computer vision is a critical component for NoTraffic technology, like you mentioned how you’re retrofitting these devices in the system and monitoring in real time. How does your system handle challenges such as wearing lighting condition because sometimes weather is bad, there is a rain or snow or the traffic is very unpredictable. So there is OCU of ensure accurate traffic, monetary analysis, how you do in a different varying weather condition and are you facing any compatibility and interoperability issue because you said you retrofit the existing traffic light, you’re not installing new and I’m pretty sure there must be some interoperability issue and in cities where we have so many diverse traffic management system, how you address that challenge.
So it’s a really good question because it took us a few good deals to develop the platform and we almost every year doing a talk together with NVIDIA in the annual conference talking about the difference between theory and practice. In theory things are super easy. You take a computer vision algorithm, you run it on a camera, you detect the vehicles, then you take some decisions, everything is sunny and nice and exactly the right angles and height and everything is amazing. The real world on the other hand is what I call a bunch of edge cases.
In the real world you have so many edge cases and so many things that you need to solve in order to really bring a product to the market in a scalable way to fully commercialize it. So it’s starting from different angles and light conditions and glares from the fog birds that landing on day on the sensor and blocking the line of sight. Anything that you can imagine and you’ll tell me, but how many times it’s happened. So not a lot of times, but there’s so many events that essentially become many times right, that’s the real world. And again, it took us a few good deals to develop the platform. We had to find solutions, how to mitigate and overcome these challenges.
There are so many different types of challenges and edge cases and how you design your system and the hardware and the algorithms, et cetera are to be able to handle these kinds of situations. By the way, that’s one of the reason that our sensors include both camera and radar because in places with rough weather, et cetera, extreme fog or snow or these kind of things, you operating critical infrastructure, you cannot say now I’m not operating because there’s snow and therefore we managed to get to a point that we are able to detect close to a hundred percent of the time all the road users out there unrelated to the type of weather, et cetera. So we today deployed in some places with extreme weather from Canada obviously to some place in the US and it’s kind of amazing and in some cases the algorithms today managed to detect things that we as human being cannot see in a human eye level.
It can detect better than what we can see better than human. Yeah, so that’s amazing. Now the other thing is about interoperability. So I think that going back to this PA and example, so if I’m kind of taking it just for the traffic management space, it’s actually kind of similar, right? It’s kind of a subset of the whole mobility ecosystem, but just in a traffic management space, it’s a very hardware driven industry and every provider or vendor is providing a single component and they were not designed to operate together. So one of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen with agencies is this interoperability issue. We literally worked with cities and places that really wanted to improve traffic and they went out there and purchased the shiniest pieces of hardware in the market in a lot of money and when they tried to make all of them somehow work together, every vendor said he need to make it work and the other one said, he need to speak with me. And a few years after this stuff still lying in a cabinet real story. Therefore what we said is how can we overcome this interoperability or integration challenge, which usually comes from the fact that you have a lot of different devices, you don’t even know where the problem is. How do you maintain it? Who is at fault, right? So the approach that we took is full ownership.
We do need to integrate with the traffic light controller, but this is something that we kind of serve this capability with our platform. So you have the ability to connect in a plug and play way to any controller in the market, but beside of that, we created the whole ecosystem in our platform via our marketplace that can provide you all of these different types of solutions in a click of a button. So going back to the consumer world before the smartphone you had a calculator in your house, a camera, a flashlight, et cetera. You couldn’t expect the manufacturer, the trough of the flashlight and the calculator to work on the integration. It’ll never work, right? This is exactly how the traffic space look, what we have done is what the smartphone has done right now it’s all application on a single platform and now all of them are working nicely together.
Amazing. I love your analogy. Instead of pushing calculator manufacturer to install it LED light just built a new phone and bring everything together.
Yeah, it’s a huge change in the conception of the market, but it’s essential to build it in the right way in order to make it work. And it’s not just about this ability to operate many different applications or services on a single platform, it’s also about other aspects like service, right? Suddenly you have a connected platform, you can provide service over the air, you can solve things in a couple of hours that on the normal market before we came could have take a few weeks. So the level of service to the entities, to the customers went dramatically up the ability to do updates and upgrades to support them, to alert them when there’s something going on, it is completely changed the way that we are looking at traffic, traffic applications, et cetera.
Amazing, I agree with you. Sometime it’s hard to find out who’s the right person within the company to solve that problem. So sometime you spend weeks to just find out the right person and with technology now it’s becoming much and more plug and play and you can solve it with the click of button rather than waiting for people to answer your email or deliver something. So you can do much better with that. Now one important thing you mentioned now the system are becoming much more intelligent now they can see even better than what we can see with the human eye and I think that’s the role of data. So data is playing such a crucial role now to train and improve these AI algorithm. Can you share some insight about how you are using machine learning algorithm in a NoTraffic solution and how do you train and fine tune these algorithms to adopt a different traffic scenario and optimize signal timing? Like you said, theory and practice is completely different. In theory you can create 10 different scenario, but when you put the system into practice it has to play in the real time. So how you are using data and training your algorithm to be more dynamic every day and improving every day?
Great. So we have few aspects of learning algorithms in our platform. One is actually on the detection side. We have an active learning mechanism that basically running a few neural networks are simultaneously and every time that they do not agree about something, then when you have this kind of a conflict, then we know that this is a piece of data that we need to look at and then retrain the algorithms based on the investigation that we had after we understood what was the issue. So this whole process is automatic and what it’s caused is kind of like an automatic improvement of the detection algorithms.
Another thing that we developed part of our core technology related more to the optimization side is the ability to create simulations that simulate the real world or kind of have the ability to project what’s going to happen in the real world in a very high QOC. And that’s super complex because most of the simulations today take a lot of assumptions. You take traffic count and then you just divide it linearly over an hour just as an example. Or you can divide it for different batches. But again, it’s unrelated to how traffic really behaving and therefore to calibrate your simulations and to create a more close to reality. This is a really difficult process that we had to go through in order to develop our algorithms so we can know with a high certainty that the improvement is significant before we even deploy them in the field. So that’s another process that we had to go through in order to know, to get a high confidence that we are on the right track before we even deploy something in a corridor.
That’s great to know that there is a self-improvement mechanism involved in the process. So you don’t need to every time go and look the machine itself is telling, okay, there is some problem and I need to improve and go back and update the database and improve. But do you also need to sometime intervene and you find some problem area where you feel like, machine is not working in the right way or the AI is not working in the right way. It’s now the human intervention require in AI, earlier it was AI intervention in human work but it’s other way around now human need to intervene and you feel like okay, something is going wrong. How do you do that?
So again, it’s a good question because again the world is complex, the real world is complex. Almost any technology have different types of Edge cases and things as I mentioned before that you kind of encounter and you say, hey, now we need to add this kind of capability or ability to react. So there are obviously some cases when we are finding out something new, it can be weird angles, it can be places that we have some stuff that blocking the line of sight or it can be many things that we can see happening. I can say that the vast majority of scenarios, since we have some quite a time on the road. I would say the vast majority of scenarios already been covered. But in some places we do finding wheeled kind of geometry of an intersection or places that have difficult places to mount the sensors and then we have to go to be creative and to come in with weird angles that sometimes can make the detection a bit more tricky. But that’s part of life. Not all intersection look the same. There is no standardization on how to build an intersection and in many cases you just have limitation by the geometry in the field and we have to just walk with that.
That’s very true. I mean no intersection is same. Everything has unique perspective and unique user profile that’s also make it different.
So I would say that again the vast, it’s like 80-20, right? Or even vast majority of them have the same, I would say parameters, et cetera. But you all the time have in some city that they have some kind of a very challenging intersection or something and suddenly you have weird geometry that you not encountered in the past and you have to solve it.
That’s true. The other puzzle, I think you need to solve is how to work with this B2G and B2B space because NoTraffic is working mostly with cities and government, and I know it’s not easy space to work with. So how does NoTraffic collaborate with city transportation agencies and other stakeholders to implement the solution? And what do you think the city should do? Because I was originally going to ask you about what challenges and considerations you face with the city, but I would ask in other ways what should City do to be more productive and work with these kind of solution in more productive way? How they can build capacity in-house to implement these kind of technology led solution.
So I would say that you have to understand how they operate, how agencies operate because I wouldn’t call it kind of difficult to work with or something like that. You need to understand how they operate and then to adapt yourself to make the process to simplify. For example, one of the agendas that we took as a company, we call it ZERO HOMEWORK to the public sector, meaning you give me a go, I’m going to make sure it’s going to work, I’m going to own the entire problem, I’m going to make sure it’s going to work. No matter if that’s an intersection with a traffic light controller from the seventies, no communication, middle of the desert, whatever we are going to make, we’re going to make it fly now in order to be able to do it, we had to solve a lot of challenges on our side, on the product side.
So that’s why it was kind of complex to develop this solution have to take into consideration many aspects that may or not maybe exist or may not, that we have to compliment. And I think that this agenda make our entire operation with public entities much easier. If you go to any city or even company and ask them to do a major change, deploying communication, that’s a big effort. It’s a big effort. And if you avoid this kind of ask and you’re just telling them, look, give me the go, I’m going to make sure it’s going to work, it’s make their life simpler. I think it just make everything much more smoother. They appreciate that and it’s make our operation way more faster and also enjoyable to the other side.
I love your point, no homework to the public sector because if you don’t give them no kids love homework. So public sector also, if you give them a list of tasks to do before implementing a project, they will feel more puzzle and lack of support. But if you tell them, you don’t need to do anything, we will do everything for you. And they will like, okay, we have full support.
By the way, it’s true for any organization. If you go to any large corporate and you tell them that they need to change their cloud architect tool so you’ll be able to provide your solution, probably it’s not going to happen the day after. So I think this kind of approach that means that I’m going to make it as seamless and easy for the other side to implement now we find it very helpful.
True. I agree with you and I think this is a very good point for any company or any startup solving a problem that you should make sure that less homework for the client because then the process will be smooth. Now initially in the beginning you mentioned the importance of public transport and really like your point about if you really solve the problem of fatality, traffic congestion, emission. We have to put more people into public transit and I think there is a lot of movement going on now to have new project in light rail infrastructure and Bus Rapid Transit in US.
The federal government is now spending a lot of money into the bus rapid transit system and I think I have seen many past traffic transit or light rail project fail because of the traffic signal. Because the traffic signal priority is not done properly. And if you don’t take care of that component very early in the project, it’ll fail.
So can you share the role of TSP in improving the efficiency of public transportation and what advice do you give to the city official or transit planner or policymaker who are considering adopting TSP? Because not all TSPs are same. So if they are looking to install a new traffic signal priority system, what should they keep in mind before procuring these new system?
So I think again, it goes back to the more holistic thing. If you just look traditionally on TSP in priority and you just specifically want when a bus is coming to get a higher priority and then he leaves and it go back to timing plan, but the intersection have no idea, but now it’s disrupted the traffic timing, the timing plan, sorry. So now you created some kind of tool it out of balance and you affected the other types of road users. So if you look at on a macro aspect, on a grid level, you create so many disruptions in the grid, which causing a lot of inefficiency and obviously.
There’s the trickier question of what kind of capacity you want to prioritize when which corridor capacity delays, schedule, et cetera. So many parameters that wars talking about as well, you don’t want necessarily to prioritize any bus just because it’s a bus.
So the way that we are looking at is again, in a simple way think about a network and think about various types of objects that using this network. And some of them need to get different attention or some of them in other world need to get different type of priority. Some of them by the way need to get even higher type of priority like emergency vehicles. And you can define the level of priority to any type of all users. And it’s important to say unless you give a preemption, which basically means I shut down everything, I let the ambulance or firetruck to pass with the other ones, it’s not necessarily going to be the case. The case is going to be more related to statistic of averages, how long in average the pass is being delayed, how long it take him to go from point A to point Z and how can you reduce this travel time over time, by the way, on a city level. So I think this is kind of the parameters that need to be measured. And again, the tradeoff here is what’s the cost that you’re going to pay in terms of how much level of priority you provide versus how do you impact the rest of the traffic. The other thing is after you finish with this prioritization, how do you go back to normal operation as soon as possible?
So if you’ve done a preemption, you shut down the intersection for an ambulance to pass, for example, the second after it passed, you need to understand what’s going on now, how many objects are waiting for each direction, how many pedestrians, how many bicycles, how many bikes, how many private cars, et cetera, and recalculate, what do you want to do? If you go back to timing plan, the timing plan is by definition not effective. At the moment you have no idea what’s going on. The situation have been completely disrupted. So this is kind of how we look at it more of on a macro level. One of our advantages is the ability to run simulations that can help you define these balances, how much you want to prioritize something versus the tradeoff for other things. However, this is on the policy level, right? That’s up to the operator to define what our system does is once you set the policy, we are going to make it run in the most effective way in the optimal way to improve delay time or reduce travel time, et cetera. Lots of safety powers and other policies that can be set by the operator.
Amazing. That’s a great point is what happened after the priority vehicle pass, how you will bring back the system into life. And the other important point you mentioned about is how much priority you want to give because sometime the bus doesn’t need priority. If it’s on time, it’s working on schedule or probably it’s before time so you actually want to delay it a little bit to make it is on time. So how you can do that? That’s amazing.
Thanks for sharing that. I agree with you, it’s a policy level decision with Cities need to define the technology can solve anything but how the policy want to deal with that issue.
So I think that one of the challenges today is to have enough data to take these decisions and define a policy, you need to see some examples of assuming that you’re providing buses the highest priority, what would happen, what would happen the day after? And if you give let’s say 50% priority or 75% or whatever, if you play with this button of priority, theoretically what will happen, what will be the impact, what will happen to the delay time of the other vehicles and other road users, et cetera. I think that this is something that severely lack today, really important to take these decisions. By the way, the priority level can also be differentiated because if the bus is in a serious delay in the schedule, you might want to give it higher priority. If it’s not, you might want to give it a list of priority.
And also there’s other aspects we talked about priority, but there’s also the aspect of the queue. So if you have an emergency vehicle coming in, if you know the entire route of the vehicle, you can clear the queue before it comes and dramatically allow it to get from point A to point B faster. If you have no idea about the route or you don’t know that the vehicle is even there because the queue is so long, then you just going to wait. And by knowing where it’s going to go, you can kill the cues or cut the cues way before it even comes.
Yeah, that sounds like easy, but I can imagine it’s so complex.
It’s easy in theory. Again, practice wise you have so many different types of conflicts that you need to solve in order to really make it happen and to make sure by the way that you don’t get into a starvation situation for instance, that you let some drivers to wait for a long time and then they will start to drive and create a safety event because they think that the traffic light is not walking fine or something similar. So there’s also kind of a psychological aspect that need to be also taken care of.
It has a big play. I remember in many of the developing part of the world, that’s how it happened. People don’t trust the traffic light and they start just driving the vehicle on their own and don’t care whether it’s green or red. So it’s a big challenge. You have to have that trust in the system and that only come when you see it’s working efficiently.
I think that the next slip, the next generation will be when this system will tell you straight to the vehicle, how long are you going to wait for example. And then you know that the system is walking fine because you have this countdown in the vehicle or what drive, what speed you should drive at in order to cross in Greenland. So all this V2X thing technology when it comes to play, I think it’ll be very beneficial to your point, it’ll provide the indication and the confidence for drivers that the system is working perhaps now with doing something else but is working. You are being taken care of, you are being concealed by the system, you’re being detected by the traffic light, ignore that you are there and you know exactly what’s going on.
Yeah, I think you mentioned the right point about V2X and the other big change we are going to see is this autonomous mobility. I mean in San Francisco now Cruise and Waymo, they can run 24X7 commercial operation and V2X will be important part of autonomous mobility and I think V2V also will play a big role in coming days.
So my question is how do you think the role of traffic light or traffic signal will change in the autonomous mobility world? And sometime I wonder, do we still need traffic signal in the future? Do we really need signal? Because if the vehicles are talking to each other and saying, Hey, I’m passing you wait and you wait and I’m passing, how do you think that will, I mean I know I’m thinking very futuristic approach, but do you are already thinking about those scenarios?
Yeah, we entertain ourself with a little discussions and questions about how the future going to look like. And look, the thing is that even if you’re looking at obviously there is a path until we get to a fully autonomous environment, but we are going through this hybrid environment for the next 10-20 years, I don’t know how many years, which we are going to have many types of vehicles connected – not connected, autonomous – not autonomous, pedestrians, all these type of things that somehow need to operate together. This is what we call the transition phase. And in X amount of vehicles we’re going to get supposedly to a fully autonomous era. Now even then, you still need to have something that will decide who is going first and that will implement the city’s policies. So the theory about this kind of era is that you’re going to have the similar concept to an air traffic control, do not necessarily need the traffic light itself. The traffic light. If you think about it, the traffic light today is the communication that allow for instance, our system to tell you as a driver, hey, you can drive or you should stop.
You are interpreting this information with your eyes. You understand, hey, it’s green, I can drive red, I need to stop. When you move to a fully autonomous era, you not necessarily need to have these lights. You can use it, you can use communication. But essentially the idea is who is going first and what kind of policy I want to implement. Because again, the policy is up to the operators to decide. Now if you look at all the academia and articles, et cetera. All of them are talking about something that we call slot based optimization, meaning that you not necessarily have to provide 20 seconds to the east approach. I can just tell you, hey, you’re approaching to the intersection, you’re going to get a slot of a couple of seconds, you need to drive in this and that speed and then you’re just going to cross.
And then you’re going to see all this cool simulation that we see that vehicles are coming from all the approaches everywhere. But also then you need to have something that will take care of pedestrian for instance. And God forbid also non-connected objects. If you left your house without a cell phone, I don’t believe that none of us believe that you should be due to die and therefore somehow someone need to take care of you, of me, of our kids, whatever, if they left home without something that transmit their location or something. Now what we are building today is exactly this. Now, today the only way that we can connect again is through the traffic lights. But if you take tomorrow all the traffic lights out, the same optimization algorithms, the same infrastructure that we are lying today is providing this kind of ability.
That’s amazing answer because I never thought about the role of air traffic control in a traffic signal sense. It’s like it’s not just directing, but it’s giving priority who should come first, who should go later and then the pedestrian because not all the pedestrian will have some signal to communicate. And sometimes it’s not possible you are in a different place or different city and it’s not possible to communicate. And I think you rightly mentioned you can actually remove the traffic signal, but the system will remain there for the priority to set up the priority who will come first, who will move. And the simulations show that you need nothing, the vehicle will just move around. But that’s too, and I think what you’re saying is marking much more practical sense than what simulation show.
I encourage you next time that you see this kind of a simulation as the person that show you where the pedestrians, where the other types of all users because it’s easy to ignore them. But usually in Uber environments, this is how the world works. You also have these creatures, it’s called pedestrians are there and they need to get services as well. And actually we see that we’re starting to have more and more and more types of mobility. So perhaps in 20 or 30 years it’s not just going to be pedestrians and bicycles, it’s going to be 20 other types of things that we need to take care as well take care of as well.
Yeah, I’m thinking about those simulation and I never saw any pedestrian. So you’re absolutely right. They never show pedestrian, they just show vehicle moving around. Amazing. So now we discussed about traffic, transportation and a lot of other stuff, but I just want to discuss about your entrepreneurial journey because it has been amazing.
Like you share, how did you start this company? How did you met your co-founder? So I can say you had a so far, really amazing entrepreneurial journey and you have built this global startup now. I mean you’re working in different countries.
What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or innovator who are interested in making a positive impact in the field of transportation, urban planning? Because it’s not an easy area. Like I told you in the beginning, starting something in mobility and transportation space is not easy. So what advice do you give to people? How should this solve that problem and where should they start?
I would frankly say that I think that doing something that you don’t like is way more difficult than any domain. If you wake up in the morning and do something that you don’t feel you like to do. I think that this by far the most difficult thing. And therefore I think that if you find a space, a domain, a problem that you love and you wake up in the morning and you don’t think about it, I’m waking up for walk. It’s like nursing a child. It is super challenging, but you don’t think about it in that way. You nursing a child, right? So it’s the same thing here. You build the company, you are nursing the company, it’s like adult child, it’s 24X7, it’s weekends, it’s holidays, whatever. But if you don’t think about it in that context, if you think about it in a context of I want to take a concept, an idea and bring it to life and transform it to a product into a company, and you like what you do, I think that’s the most important thing. And if you not in this kind of concept, it’ll be very difficult.
I agree. I think nursing a child is a good analogy to say because it’s not easy to raise a child and it’s not easy to build a company
Exactly right. But I mean you do what you need to do. If you need to wake up for your kid in the middle of the night, it’s what you do, right?
You have no excuse, you have to do it.
Exactly. Same thing here, but you just need to come prepare that take a lot of effort. But if you like it, you like your kids. And when you do that, you don’t think about how miserable you are. You think about, well, my kid is now he needs me. So I think that’s kind of the make it much more easier in a way to kind of build something no matter in which domain.
Amazing. I agree with you. It’s far more difficult to do what you don’t like than do anything. You like something, just go for it and do it now.
NoTraffic has recently raised $50 million. It’ll be billion one day, but right now, $50 million in Series B. So congratulations to you and team. And I think in total you have raised $75 million, which is remarkable because it’s clearly shows you have a product market fit now and the company’s growing.
Can you share some of the lessons learned during the fundraising process? Because you actually raise funding in this difficult period when everybody’s talking about, the funding is not available. And there are a lot of, but you raise a big round in this period.
And how should founder find the right investor and build a long-term relationship? Because I think that’s a very important, and shout out to Sebastian. I would say he’s one of your biggest ambassador because everywhere he go he talk about NoTraffic. He say, this is one of my portfolio company, you should always look and check it out. So how do you find the right investor?
Again, the way I look at it is, by the way, it’s true for investors and true for employees, it’s true for anyone in the company. All of us are waking up in the morning and we’re coming here to walk and we want to have a working environment that we feel comfortable unrelated to titles, unrelated to hierarchy, unrelated to anything. And I think that’s kind of something when we are bringing anyone from employees to investors, it’s all about the people.
So you can have a very fancy brand, but if you have no chemistry with the people there, it’s going to be difficult. Specifically now when the world is going crazy and we are going through crazy times with this pandemic and then economical economic issues and potentially recession and this kind of stuff, the water are rough and you are on a boat and you want to have the best grow on board because it’s crazy out there.
And I think it’s the same thing for investors. Now, the way I look at investors, it’s not just about someone has comes and put some money and go away. I personally maintaining good relationship with all of our investors, I keep them updated, I ask for their advice and on a personal level, I try to create or not try to create. We just kind of becoming in a very good relationship because it’s not just about meeting them once in a quarter in a board meeting.
And I think it’s also make them feel more connected to the company and want to help and want to promote. Now the other thing that, this is more from my side I would say, but essentially any investor have at least several companies, some of them have perhaps like hundreds of companies. And I think that your mission as a founder as a CEO is someone of the trace funds is how do you ensure that when someone asks these investors. What’s your best company? Or Give me some insight or some cool things about your portfolio, how do you make sure that these people are going to talk about you? Because ambassadors and you are in competition with other companies that not necessarily in your space, that can be cybersecurity, that can be medical devices, can be many things, but you want to make sure that you kind of stick and sit in his brain when someone ask him about any company, your name will come out. And I think that’s a challenge, but this is one of the things that I’m talking a lot on to make sure that everyone that involved in the company will actually be a great ambassador.
That’s amazing. I think I love your point about saying it’s not the money, it’s not the title which attract people, it’s the environment, the purpose you create for people to come and join in. And that’s what I feel more excited to work with startup is because I see there is a purpose, there is a reason behind it and
I was listening to somebody yesterday and the point they mentioned is the startup solves something which is not clear because if it’s clear, anybody could have solved it, but they try to solve a problem or try to solve something which is not even clear and they want to disrupt something. So finding that higher purpose is very important and bringing like-minded people.
So kudos to you are, I mean, doing a great job and taking forward the company in a great way. I think it’s come from the top, the leadership, like how you want to bring that culture.
Now this is my last question, and like you said, I love your point about the dynamic world. Our world is changing so rapidly. What trend do you foresee shaping the future of urban mobility and traffic management in next decade by 2035 or 30? What do you think?
And you pointed out that you are using neural network, so do you think neural network or AI will play an important role in next 10 year and will change the whole society and the way we move and maybe work around?
So let me try to give you an answer from another angle. So the way I look at it is in a way the technology, it’s not really interesting. That’s what I call under the hood. If you ask me in 20 years from now or something like that, what I would like to see, I would like to leave my house, push a button, Uber or whatever, they’re going to call this ride hailing company and it going to give me 3.5 minutes estimation. And in 3.5 minutes a vehicle will come, will pick me up and it’ll tell me that the ETA for the location is 17 minutes and I’ve got to be there exactly in 17 minutes. This is what I care about. And now we need to make it work. And in order for it to work, we need the right tele company, we need a traffic management company, we need the fleet management company.
We need so many aspects to come together for the simple thing as concrete estimation, timing, et cetera, everything to work like a Swiss clock. So this is what I would like to see, and this again just one example of something simple that in theory it’s almost here, but it’ll take it a long time until we’re going to get to this precision. Now under the hood, if you look on what kind of technologies can enable these kind of things. So obviously AI is playing a huge part. If it’s generative or something else, it depends on the problems that we’re trying to solve.
I think that just thinking about technology and what it can do, it’s not necessarily the right way. I would usually try to look at the problem and then think what will be the best way to solve this problem in the most efficient way, in the most cost efficient way, otherwise someone else will come and solve it in a much more cost efficient way and my company will die. So it’s not about using certain technologies, blockchain or whatever, it’s about defining the problem and realize what’s the best way to solve it and what kind of tools I have today to solve this problem and what kind of tools are going to have in 10 years to solve it.
I think that’s the best answer I can think of because it’s not about technology. It’s about what problem you want to solve and how you can solve it a most cost efficient, and I would say most convenient way rather than putting 10 layers of technologies and like you mentioned, so it’s not going to solve the real problem, which is there. So just think about the problem and the problem.
You rightly said, people want to move around freely more conveniently and more cost-efficient way. You don’t want to spend too much of money to move around, so you want to make it more economical. Well thanks for that point.
And again, if you think about Ubers today, what’s the difference if you have a driver or if you do not have a driver, you push the button, it essentially get to you takes some time. By the way, I think that Uber is an amazing technology, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t really matter if you have a driver or not.
So true
We are already in a place where we are kind of doing the right steps towards, and I think that we are on the right track, but in order to get that real fine tune, it’s just going to take a lot of effort.
Oh yeah, yeah. It’s not easy. That’s what people say. The first 99% is easy, but the last 1% take hell. Lot of efforts to make it a 100%. So we are kind of there but not completed yet.
Exactly. And also there’s other aspects like safety, et cetera. If you have an autonomous vehicle involving an accident, the psychological part is huge because it’s kind of a machine that injured or killed someone. It’s something that it’s unacceptable in a way. Whereas when a driver kills someone, we as mankind, we kind of accepting that. So I think there’s a lot of aspects. So it’s not just about getting in the fastest way but getting in the safest way, paying the lowest price, something that will make sense for all of us. So there’s a lot of different that have to come together in order to really make it work like a well-tuned machine.
Very true. Uber CEO was recently mentioning, he said every day a lot of people died in the road accident killed by the human driver, but even if he have one fatality by the machine, it’ll be headline everywhere. So the acceptability is still not there. So we don’t see machine doing those kind of stuff. So you are right. It takes a lot of efforts to make it happen.
Thank you so much Tel. I mean this is really wonderful conversation and generally we end our episode with the rapid fire question round. So if you’re ready, I’ll just fire all the question to you.
Let’s do it.
Okay. So I mean you already hinted you work in so many different sector and so many different industry, but if you’re not building NoTraffic right now, what other profession you would have selected and you would be okay because you said you wanted to go out for finance. So if it’s no traffic, what other profession you would’ve selected?
I have no idea. I knew I want to do something, establish something by myself. NoTraffic was definitely not something I was even thinking about. It was just I would say kind of all the stars were aligned at that point. But I don’t know. I just knew I was going to build something. I didn’t know what it is.
So it’s like traffic have picked you up, not you.
Yeah NoTraffic is, I was obviously very interested in traffic in general. I don’t know if it was cosmotic, probably I was not even looking at this because it’s not something that I find for me at least a domain that’s kind of get me excited. But there are other amazing domains if you look, I mean there’s tons of stuff that can be interesting.
Jaspal Singh [01:10:09]:
Oh yeah, that’s true. there are so many different problems in the world right now. So you always see problem around.
Tel Kreisler [01:10:16]:
Yeah, I think agriculture. Agriculture is another one thing that I find fascinating. And by the way, that’s also a huge problem if you think about humanity moving forward. And I think there’s so much to do over there to improve things. So that’s also fascinating for me.
So it’s like a retirement plan after NoTraffic
Still have a long run, still have a long, I still have a long run.
I know we need more city with NoTraffic system. So now, which is your favorite city in the world and why? You have travel all around, which is your favorite city?
Wow.
It means you love all of them. Yeah.
Wow. That’s a good one. Have a few. I would say that I really like the cities that are on the coastline of California specifically. Remember Oceanside? I think it was the name Oceanside. So I really like the sea and the beach and the atmosphere. So others think it’s cool, but beside of that, I mean, I never thought about it, I have to say. Yeah, it’s a good question. I need to think about it.
The best answer I got was when one of our guests said the next one, when I asked him, which is your next favorite city, he said the next one. He said, all cities are beautiful. So whichever was mixing the next one is my favorite. So it’s a difficult question to answer because when you visit so many cities, it’s hard to remember what exactly attractive.
I think every place have its own character, which by the way are very different. I frankly just to see different things. It’s super interesting to see different cultures, different approaches. I think that what’s a bit funny is that every city thing, that they’re special and that they have certain problems that only they’re facing and then you go to the next one and they think that they’re special as well, and they’re also the only one that have these sets of problem. Then you realize that all of them essentially is facing the same, more or less the same issues, which is quite funny. But I need to think about the city question.
Okay, so I’ll ask you in five-year’s time when you have more. So now I don’t know if you get too much time to read books and do something else, but if you have any favorite book, which kind of you recommend to people recently read?
I think it’s a cool book. It’s called Pitch Anything. So it is about this psychological aspect of selling, pitching. So it’s something I find interesting was written by Oren Klaff and it is kind of talking about taking the conversation in depth about how the brain is walking and interpreting some of the things that’s happening in the environment, et cetera. So I find it interesting.
I’ll put it in my reading list and read it. I mean, sounds interesting. Pitch anything because that’s the lie right now. You have to pitch everything in life to your kids, to your family, to the investor, to the employees, to your clients. So it’s all about pitching.
Yeah, I completely agree.
So my fourth question is, which one thing do you wish you should have learned early in life?
Tricky one.
Anything related to business, personal side. Like you feel Okay, I should have learned this early, a little early.
Oh, it’s a good question. You caught me off guard twice. I owe you an answer for this as well.
Okay. So I’ll send you an email and probably we will put in the show notes. This is my last question, and this probably will be tricky or it’ll be easy. It’s like if you can change one thing in life, what would it be?
My life or In general?
Anything in the society or in the life or anything. If you can change, if you get a magic wand and say, okay, you can change one thing, what will you pick up? Some people said that they want to cease to go away. Some people said they want cars to go away. I got this answer, this car should go away.
Yeah,
Tel Kreisler [01:14:59]:
I don’t think I would want anything to go away. I think that the only thing perhaps I would say is that I think that essentially the vast majority of human beings are more or less the same. So I think that some of the dispute and argument, et cetera that we have, I think that essentially all of us want to wake up in the morning, have a decent walk, decent life, decent health. So I think that a lot of things related to territory, religious, et cetera, worldwide. By the way, I think there’s a vast majority of population, essentially they can live in one happy village in a way. Some like to do one thing the other to do other thing, but essentially all of them, 99% of the things are more or less the same. So I don’t know if it’s something concrete, but it’s kind of focusing on coming together in a way and putting some of these conflicts aside.
I love this answer. I mean I agree with you. It’s like I see everybody’s same and I don’t understand why they’re fighting. So I feel like, man, everybody has same problem. Why don’t you just take care of things which are important to you and don’t try to trouble others?
True. That’s the point. Eventually everyone lose, right? So what’s the point? If you kind of think about it in a more mature way and growing up way, it’s like it doesn’t make sense.
Just be happy. Just be happy. Just be happy and let other be happy.
Look, we have so many challenges as mankind that we need to face health challenges and resources and food, et cetera. We have enough big things to face, which not necessarily directly related to us, right? Global warming for instance. It is related to us, but I think that we need to think about together as a mankind, how we can make sure that our existence on this planet will last also for our kids and moving forward. And I think that this is the big thing that we as mankind have to be unite around anything together.
Yeah, I call it entrepreneurial mindset. It’s like we already have so many problems to solve, so why don’t you spend your time, energy efforts to solve those problems rather than wasting your life on doing trivial things. I love your point. I love your point. See if you get more time, you think better. So no, thank you so much tel. I mean I love our conversation. I really enjoyed, I think some of the perspective you shared it give me new ideas and I’m pretty sure the listener who will be listening to this will get some new idea from this conversation. So thank you for your time. I know you have a busy review, but thank you taking out this time and sharing your experience and learning with us.
Great conversation. Thanks for the questions I really enjoyed and I look forward to see you around conferences, stuff, events, whatever.
For sure. Somewhere in the world.
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Introduction:
Traffic Congestion is emerging as a major challenge for the cities. More than 1.35 million people die in road accidents every year people are losing 51 hours in traffic jams every year. Traffic management systems use traditional methods to regulate the traffic flow. However, many cities are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve traffic congestion issues and follow a network approach rather than a single junction. The cities can simulate different scenarios in real-time to understand the impact on a network basis. Further, Transit Signal Priority (TSP) is helping to reduce travel time for the riders and improve efficiency. The episode will cover the topics related to AI in Traffic Management and the role of traffic signals for autonomous vehicles.
Tal Kresier is the Co-founder and CEO of @NoTraffic. NoTraffic is a company that focuses on developing technology for intelligent traffic management and optimization. As CEO, he manages a large team of industry leaders from various fields such as AI, Machine Vision, Cybersecurity, and Engineering, bringing the team together and creating the most sophisticated traffic management platform. Prior to NoTraffic, Tal served as a Business Analyst at Beta Finance consulting firm, where he led complex projects in the transportation, infrastructure, and energy industries.