Connected roadways: What to expect from ITS America Expo?

It’s a remarkably interesting time for anyone involved in operating roadways. In the US, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), stimulus support, and other funding sources are available for State, Local, and Tribal governments to modernize roadways with goals to increase public safety, reduce traffic congestion, rise operational efficiency, and lower carbon emissions. 

No doubt the ITS America Conference & Expo next week will feature great technologies and surprising innovations to better manage traffic signals at intersections, monitor weather and road conditions, provide information and guidance to the public in real time, automate video surveillance analytics, pave the way to autonomous driving, and more. 

Modern roadways need modern networks

All of these solutions can drive great outcomes, provided they can be simply deployed and secured at scale, as well as easily monitored and managed remotely. The distributed nature of roadway infrastructure calls for simple, secure, and scalable networking solutions. Some of the most advanced use cases also require innovative ways to collect data generated by roadside equipment.  

In the greater Atlanta area for instance, the Gwinnett County DOT just announced they are standardizing connectivity to all traffic signals with Cisco. This will help improve network uptime and put the groundwork in place for an intelligent transportation system (ITS) in the not-so-distant future. 

The Cisco building blocks for ITS 

Make sure you stop by the Cisco booth (#1317) at ITS America to see our demos and discover how Cisco is driving simplicity, scale, security, and innovation for road infrastructures: 

• Enabling connectivity at scale.
  Cisco’s wide range of ruggedized routers, switches, and wireless backhaul products let you connect all your devices using the best technology for your specific needs, whether fiber, copper, cellular 4G/5G, or ultra-reliable wireless backhaul. 
• Simplifying provisioning and management.
  Cisco’s cloud operating model is ideally suited to help you easily manage distributed routers remotely, and securely gain remote access to connected devices for configuration and maintenance. 
• Protecting against cyber threats.
  Cisco’s networking equipment gives you comprehensive visibility into your security posture and helps you enforce security policies without the need for extra hardware appliances in street cabinets.  
• Empowering innovations.
  Cisco’s networking equipment lets you collect data from connected assets or LoRaWAN sensors to fuel your applications with environmental insights so you can enable innovative outcomes.  

Please do not miss our joint demo with Ouster’s Gemini lidar. We will show how Cisco Edge Intelligence running on Cisco Industrial Routers can convert the lidar’s point cloud into meaningful metadata your applications can leverage to influence an intersection’s traffic signal phase when detecting pedestrians in the crosswalk for instance. 

Make sure you attend our breakout session on Tuesday, April 25th. We will discuss how Cisco is helping build technologies to create the world’s fastest autonomous vehicles by contributing to the Indy Autonomous Challenge. This type of innovation will greatly improve collision detection and avoidance systems to make our roads safer as we move towards a more autonomous future. 

Learn more

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