Imagine yourself sitting in your car on the road and going nowhere. The cars in front of you begin to move ever so slightly, then stop again. The car to the right of you honks his horn and screams at the cars in front of him to move, knowing full well that it won’t work.

Now imagine yourself cruising along at a reasonable pace with only half of the previous cars around you and the angry man to your right is no more.

This is more so becoming the case in many cities that have started to implement smart traffic lights/signals.

A smart traffic signal is a system that combines the conventional traffic light with an artificial intelligence (AI) in order to create lights that truly think for themselves. They are essentially signals that utilize a buried induction coil to sense the presence of signals that adapt to information that is received from a central computer about the position, speed, and direction of vehicles.

These lights are starting to take hold of the world in everywhere from the busy cities of New York to the congested streets of China.

A study conducted by Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute sampled data across the US, which shows drivers stuck in traffic 38 hours per year and a similar study of Britain’s high-density centres carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research shows motorists idling 50 hours annually.

With these installed, the amount of time motorists would spend idling at traffic lights was reduced by forty percent and time spent on your daily commute would be reduced by twenty-six percent.

Smart traffic lights could also do many other things than control traffic flow. Romanian and US research teams believe that the reduced time motorists spend at lights could cut CO2 emissions by as much as 6.5%

“Medical personal and law enforcement would also greatly benefit from these traffic lights since they would reduce road congestion and lead to fewer complications while attempting to travel to the location of the emergency,” as stated by Jeremy Crowford, a former police officer.

These traffic lights would not be all that expensive either. Smart traffic lights would only cost slightly more than the conventional traffic light, making them the only reasonable and logical replacement for the future.