Coming: Smart trafffic lights

Manama : Traffic lights at junctions will go ‘intelligent’ in a few years as the authorities are looking at ways to improve the system. If such a system is implemented, the smart traffic lights would send information to cars when it is about to go red and suggest the cars to slow down. However, only the latest cars equipped with receiving the signals will benefit from the ‘smart traffic lights’ which can alert drivers well in advance, Central Informatics Organization (CIO) Director General of Information Systems Shaikh Salman bin Mohammed Al Khalifa told DT News.

He said that the government would also improve how they provide traffic updates.

“Smart city is a fancy buzz word and it needs to be applied in real scenarios. It is not a single entity’s task, it is a national task. We have interesting plans like providing traffic updates directly onto your navigation system but the problem with these things is that not all navigation systems have the same standards. We are in talks with companies such as ‘Here’ to see how we can apply it. Some of the new cars that are coming out can receive alerts from the traffic lights and inform the drivers when the traffic lights are about to turn red and suggests slowing down. This is one of the things we are interested in, we are working with the works authority to make the traffic lights more intelligent. We can feed the information and send it to the cars. But this are only exclusive to certain model of cars,” he said.

“If in the end there aren’t many cars that can accept it there is no point in us making it available. If we do not have the cars that are smart enough to accept it, it is going to be a wasted effort. We are also looking at how we can build a smarter city. This three dimensional view of a city is really valuable and makes them planning smarter. For example by putting certain data in a three dimensional view we can see if building this glass building will increase the heat on the area. Instead we can try to ascertain how we can make things cooler by having green rooftops at a strategic level in urban planning. These are things that we can do but it has to start with the foundation,” he said.