Why Are Some State And Federal Transportation Agencies Relying On Iteris? ClearGuide Is Part Of The Reason

When it comes to protecting pedestrians crossing the streets and vehicles on the roadways and reducing traffic congestion, it takes more than traffic signals, crossing guards and law enforcement. Analyzing data generated by monitoring the position of individual vehicles over space and time can also play an important role. Such modern solutions to the issue can enable safer, less congested roads, centered around a software platform that can analyze all the data coming in to provide better results. 

Iteris Inc., a global player in connected vehicle (CV) and connected vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, checks off all those boxes. ClearGuide®, the company's transportation analytics solutions suite, is at the center of its offerings, helping agencies improve safety and mobility by turning large amounts of complex transportation data into insights for smart, data-driven operations and planning decisions. 

With real-time data collected from anonymized geolocation information from smart devices and analyzed by ClearGuide, agencies can make informed operational decisions, monitor congestion on any roadway and create in-depth before-and-after performance reports and post-event analysis. It doesn't require any hardware either. Additionally, because ClearGuide doesn't require any hardware for data collection, agencies can monitor traffic patterns without installing or upgrading existing infrastructure.

Whether it's using information gathered by monitoring the position and behavior of vehicles as they travel the roads to manage traffic or spotting incidents and road work to help first responders identify faster routes, the company says ClearGuide can do it. The solutions suite can provide agencies with all the real-time, actionable data they need.

The company's solutions couldn't come at a better time. As it stands, the average driver in America spends roughly 54 hours a year sitting in traffic. Meanwhile, traffic accidents cause $340 billion in damages annually, and about 7,500 pedestrians are struck and killed by motor vehicles each year. Reducing that is a priority, spawning an international effort to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries. Known as Vision Zero, the initiative leverages technology, enforcement and education to make the roads, crosswalks and intersections safer for everyone.

ClearGuide Makes Roads Safer

ClearGuide's solutions address that and more, helping with planning and safety – all the while cutting costs and boosting efficiencies for its clients. Take ClearGuide Safety for starters. With this analytics solution, data collected from vehicles can be used to identify speeding hotspots, red-light running patterns and pedestrian safety risks at intersections. Armed with that information, agencies can implement effective countermeasures. ClearGuide Safety can also be used to verify citizen complaints about unsafe travel areas – without having to send out personnel. The software can also analyze the effectiveness of countermeasures. 

Then there's ClearGuide Roadways. Leveraging performance measure reports, trend maps and congestion hotspot analysis, ClearGuide Roadways helps agencies improve real-time operations, incident management and work zone mobility through map tools and congestion alerts. 

It can also reduce costs and boost productivity when it comes to roadwork, thanks to Iteris' use of anonymized dashboard camera imagery loaded into ClearGuide. The front-facing dash cam images are obtained from commercial fleets using on-vehicle cameras for their delivery and service trucks – enabling ClearGuide to capture pre-project baseline data and identify any new issues. As a result, agencies can skip field staff observations, potentially saving the municipality money. 

Meanwhile, with ClearGuide's Road Surface Information (RSI) dataset, information about road friction, road roughness, potholes and speed bumps is collected from connected vehicle sensors. With both winter and summer datasets available, real-time friction data can be acted upon during winter, and defects on the road in the summer season can be detected before they become dangerous to drivers.

Lowering Costs For Cities Around The World 

With 24/7 monitoring, ClearGuide can potentially replace thousands of person-hours of operational support, reports the company. ClearGuide can also help improve the safety of construction workers by reducing staff time in the field. Workers no longer need to install, maintain and move temporary detection systems for projects. Agencies can also identify where the project schedule can be accelerated with minimal traffic impact as traffic conditions are updated every five minutes in ClearGuide.

Furthermore, ClearGuide helps agencies analyze and better manage congestion with features such as ClearGuide's Signal Trends, which is a set of probe data-based performance metrics. The company says it helps agencies reduce congestion by monitoring traffic signal performance and identifying deterioration at the intersection without reliance on infrastructure. The module updates intersection data every 10 to 15 minutes, displaying abnormal conditions as they emerge. 

Signal Trends complements Iteris' detection and traffic analytics software by helping agencies easily identify signal maintenance or traffic congestion problems at more intersections, including where they have not implemented traffic sensors. Then there is ClearGuide Volumes, which provides volume-based traffic analytics powered to help agencies make even more precisely honed planning and operations decisions and produce new types of traffic and congestion reports.

With all that data and analytics at agencies’ fingertips without the need for additional hardware, it is no wonder Iteris counts local municipalities, regional agencies, state Departments of Transportation and federal government transportation agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration and National Highway Institute as customers. They are using it for everything from preparing for hurricanes to streamlining data collection and analysis. 

Traffic congestion and road safety are major issues for cities and towns around the world. With efforts underway to fix the problem, software platforms like ClearGuide are in the driver's seat. 

 To learn more about Iteris and what its ClearGuide software platform can do, click here. 

Featured image by TRANG NGUYEN on Pixabay.

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