Peachtree Corners, Georgia, 21 miles north of downtown Atlanta, is keeping the smart city ideal alive in the ongoing quest of city managers everywhere to keep pedestrians safe as they cross busy roadways while also helping drivers move efficiently on their way to work and shopping.
“We have a big focus on pedestrian safety even with exponential growth. We’ve approved a lot of development and we are car-centric,” assistant city manager and CTO Brandon Branham told Fierce Electronics. The city of 50,000 residents also has 50,000 jobs, but only 11% of its residents live and work in the city, which creates the need for efficient and safe roadways as many residents drive to other cities for jobs while many residents from other towns travel to office parks in Peachtree Corners for their jobs.
Town leaders spend time examining if “we are implementing the right planning and slowing speeds,” he added. Roundabouts where pedestrians meet roadways are part of the planning formula, but there’s a heavy emphasis on traffic technology as well, some of it involving cellular connectivity to smart vehicles. Still, Branham is emphatic that pedestrian safety is job number 1, followed second with traffic efficiency.
The latest safety and efficiency innovation is advanced lidar being installed on poles at city intersections with technology from Seyond in a collaboration with the city and its Curiosity Lab innovation center. A combination of Seyond’s lidar, OmniVidi Perception Service software and Blue-Band Integrator AI will help the city with 3D mapping of the area. With lidar, the city will be able to see both vehicles (including bikes) and pedestrians, all without revealing their faces or other personally identifiable information to protect their privacy.
With the data and Blue-Band’s analysis, the city can adjust traffic signals, pedestrian crossing signals and then begin to plan for improved intersection design. The lidar could even be used to look at parking operations.
Seyond has already sold its lidar technology for use in automotive applications to further self-driving and sees the Peachtree Corners project as way to test and potentially prove the value of lidar sensing for traffic monitoring to state departments of transportation around the nation, said Steven Sheffield, strategy marketing manager at Seyond. “Lidar opens up more opportunities for traffic timing and operations,” he explained.
Branham said the city could use data to vary green signal timing, depending on time of day or the day of the week. The city already sees 100 bikes along the affected corridor from Monday through Friday, which mushrooms to 600 on the weekends. Meanwhile hundreds more apartments, hotel rooms and stores are planned for near Peachtree Corners Circle and Peachtree Parkway, so current traffic data can be used to extrapolate with expected growth. He envisions traffic controls being able to send countdown time for when a green light moves to yellow and then red to drivers’ smartphones and eventually dashboards of cars so drivers are aware when a green signal time has changed depending on time of day and day of the week.
The lidar project will also compare the lidar’s detection of vehicles and pedestrians with magnetic loops in the roadway and radar. Ultimately, lidar detection will be similar in cost to radar. Soon, power of Ethernet will allow lidar devices to be placed on poles further away from nearly cabinets. Lidar will be installed at up to 11 signalized intersections, with four lidar devices expected per intersection.
“With Seyond’s solutions, we will be able to see farther, clearer and react faster to transportation and [pedestrian] needs across Peachtree Corners,” Branham said. Lidar is also being studied by Bellevue, Washington, he said. The results of early work with lidar in Peachtree Corners will be shared with other smart city professionals at events like the Smart City World Congress in Barcelona in November, he predicted.
The modern smart city movement is 15 years old and has reached a more practical stage where technology applications are being tested and implemented instead of only being talked about, Branham added. “With the smart city movement, the hype is gone and now there are more applications. The movement is still alive.”