Street Smarts 101: 5 Best Practices for Transportation

Autonomous vehicles, drones, and underground tunnels (thank you Elon Musk) may grab the headlines, but are they ready for prime time? When you think about solving immediate problems in our transportation infrastructure, there is a better approach. One that adds true value to your community; bringing connectivity to roadways. And here are five things it can help communities do better.

Best practices for roadways

Building better cities should, ideally, begin with intelligent transportation systems. When designed right, they can result in safer roads while also serving as the skeleton for a community’s network fabric. And the best place to start is by enabling connectivity along roadway corridors and intersections.

In Street Smarts 101: 5 Best Practices for Connected Roadways you’ll find out how connecting corridors and intersections through innovative technologies can improve a variety of issues that may be impacting your community’s transportation systems. From reducing traffic congestion and improving work zone protection, to maximizing your data for better insight, By bringing connectivity to roadways, we are already providing real value in creating safer roads. In Street Smarts 101 you’ll learn:

How to achieve your transportation goals

The power of scalability, and starting small to reap big benefits

How edge processing can speed response times

How to use automation to increase resiliency

The 3 simple steps to keep it all secure.

And you’ll even get up, and stay up, to speed with the latest resources, and get thinking about social media for citizen engagement.

The IoT is critical for making roads safer

Did you know that bringing connectivity to roadways starts with the Internet of Things (IoT)? The IoT lets government agencies like yours secure and connect technologies embedded within vehicles, roadways, and traffic management systems. This connectivity can even extend to drivers. By bringing it all together you can now share and act upon all the data in your transportation environment, in real-time, to create safer roads and:

Enhance roadside safety

Manage system performance and traffic operations

Securely collect and report data

Improve emergency management

Build more environmentally and sustainable approaches.

Is all transportation infrastructure created equal?

Attempts to develop intelligent transportation systems have had varied success. There really is a difference among the solutions offered in the marketplace. For example, at Cisco we look at transportation holistically. This makes our Connected Roadways solution pretty unique.

This approach to safer roads provides an end-to-end, highly secure network; from vehicles to roadways to surrounding infrastructure. This lets your community automate actions, such as compliance standards and roadway signage, through our Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform, and can be coupled with your current or planned smart cities initiative. We’ve also tested and validated each aspect of our solution using Cisco Validated Designs to help you reduce problems during deployment.

So we encourage you to take a deeper dive with Street Smarts 101: 5 Best Practices for Connected Roadways and take your first steps to safer roads in your community.

Additional Resources

eBook: Connecting Intelligent Transportation Systems

Graphic: Digital Architecture and Use Cases for Connected Roadways

Article: Connected Cars: Digging Deeper on Data