Philadelphia’s Smart Traffic & Transit Strategy – Part 1

When you travel to the US or live there, something sticks out like a sore thumb. Traffic, and the city of Philadelphia is not immune to it. With its dense, narrow streets and tight blocks and 1.6 million residents, the municipality that saw Rocky Balboa climb the steps of its art museum needs to knock out traffic issues. Traffic patterns are very interesting in Philadelphia, especially post-pandemic. So traffic levels, I would say, are as high as they were before. And in the region, it's among the most congested in the nation for sure. And I think it ranked top 10 in the world in one review. But that's when you think about the fact that we don't have an extensive expressway network the way that many Sunbelt cities do, many cities in the south. and west to manage traffic the city has its own traffic operations center where road flow data is collected through the municipalities over 860 traffic cameras they can even tap into the more than 5 000 cameras owned by different authorities like the pennsylvania traffic department penn dot the philadelphia police department the transit authority of southeastern pennsylvania scepter and other agencies we were a little bit late maybe about 10 years ago getting a traffic management center and I think what we found is that traffic management centers were changing just as we were getting one. We use these tools to have a good sense of you know which intersections are failing maybe we can retime signals on the fly but we also on top of that in the same period we're able to implement bus priority and so this is our ability to extend green times for buses and we've seen some success around that but I think we're at a point now we have to figure out how to integrate all that. I think we're interested in exploring technology that operates at the edge more. Our system was set up with federal funding so we comply with all the federal regulations in terms of how we handle the video, but I think the public would have greater comfort and we might have more confidence in the resiliency of the system if we work more with with edge -based technology. So we're experimenting a little bit with that. We've got one block we call this block where we deployed edge sensors and they've worked pretty well. How we're going to use that data though is something we're trying to figure out. Despite having the control center, the municipality still hasn't reached the integration they want to achieve. The data is useful for real -time decisions and they also integrate with PennDOT District 6 as they use the city's camera to manage their traffic too. But they're looking to integrate more. We're collecting analytics, I think we could do more with that. frankly but uh the other sources of data that are out there so we use some of the aggregators like enrich for uh certain things and ways is uh is a partner we've worked with through their community-based uh programs and we're we're always trying to explore how to integrate more septa actually helps us quite a bit they've integrated the swiftly uh information in in their data collection and so getting it all together in one place is still a challenge we have to take on the municipality also has other types of cameras that help reduce infractions like the 146 red light enforcement cameras at 34 intersections and even 32 speed enforcement cameras at Roosevelt Boulevard, one of the most dangerous roads in the country, which has led to a 90 % decrease in violations. But that's not the only projects they've tried out. They recently piloted a smart loading zone. The pilot had 20 paid curbside loadings. for delivery drivers in the downtown area. Delivery companies were able to reserve spaces and times through the app PebbleDriver. Fleet managers registered fleets, entered license plates associated with them and added payment information on the platform. The municipality's goal with the project, which ended in April, was to get an idea of loading activities, something they'll see when the data is analyzed in the upcoming months. According to Mike, the city is also very focused on its public transit to reduce congestion. Before the pandemic, they were registering 1 million unlinked rides a day, a number that post-COVID has gone down to 620,000. But to improve the public transport offer and attract more riders, the city continues to turn to smart solutions. But click on the part two video to find more about Philadelphia's mobility.