PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 Ever get frustrated while stuck at a long traffic light?<\/p>\n
Pinellas County is working on that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
New technology powered by artificial\u00a0intelligence is helping the county to improve drive times and find potential safety issues at intersections.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe now have our eyes on these intersections every day,\u201d said Deneta Jones, manager at the Pinellas County Traffic Management Center.<\/p>\n
Jones says AI is helping her team identify potential trouble spots at dozens of busy intersections.<\/p>\n
The technology picks up actions like illegal crossings, close calls or red light running.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom that, we can see if there is something that we can do to help raise that safety score. Is there some signage we need to do? Is there some enforcement? Things like that,\u201d Jones said. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The cameras are not used to charge or identify drivers \u2014 rather they help find safety issues that the human eye might miss.<\/p>\n
This use of what\u2019s called \u2018intersection video analytics\u2019 comes after years of planning and funding.<\/p>\n
In fact, teams have also been using new tech to re-time 350 traffic signals. That totals more than 40 miles of improved congestion.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get traffic moving along the corridors, during the morning and afternoon peak periods,\u201d said Tom Washburn, Transportation Division Director.<\/p>\n
Over the next several years, Pinellas County plans to incorporate this new AI at hundreds of intersections with a traffic signal in order to get more data.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so valuable. We never had it before. So it\u2019s very important for us to have it now, and we\u2019re very excited about all the data that we get,\u201d Jones said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. \u2014 Ever get frustrated while stuck at a long traffic light? Pinellas County is working…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[7444,115,596,202,204,203,199,201,200,135,7227,729,835],"class_list":["post-251739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-getting-there","tag-news","tag-pinellas-county","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-tampa","tag-tim-wronka","tag-traffic","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}