Israeli AI System Saving US Drivers From Endless Traffic Jams

An Israeli startup has brought a revolutionary traffic management system to the United States, allowing American urban areas to control the ebb and flow of its vehicles on demand – turning the roads into what a NoTraffic executive calls a giant “game of chess.” 

Through the use of its smart technology and artificial intelligence system, NoTraffic says it can cut down the amount of time drivers spend stuck in jams.

The system collects data on the number and types of road users – be it cars, bikes, buses or even people on foot – from a mix of cameras, radar and chips that can communicate with autonomous vehicles. These data-collection sensors are placed at intersections and other points on the road.  

This data is then sent to a cloud-based platform, which uses algorithms to analyze the information and predict imminent traffic events in great detail. 

These events include which lane a particular car will take and how that might impact congestion at the next intersection; when a car might run a red light; and even where and when a pedestrian will step into the street without warning. 

Once the system has built up an image of the upcoming situation on the roads, it can then manage the flow of vehicles through the traffic lights connected to the platform. The chip sensors can even tell an autonomous car to slow down if it is approaching an intersection too quickly.

The platform can also present the information in a dashboard for city engineers, who can use it for big data analytics, remote monitoring of intersections and the implementation of new traffic policies. 

“It’s kind of like a game of chess, where you’re calculating all the moves ahead and deciding what the next best step is,” Matan Nir, Director of Business Development and Marketing of NoTraffic, tells NoCamels. 

Traffic lights normally run on timers that are set using certain statistics, such as the volume of traffic during weekends and at peak hours of the day, says Nir.

But even though a single intersection can have between 60 and 100 different timer settings that operators can switch between throughout the day, Nir explains that traffic engineers in the US only adjust these timers every three to five years. 

This, he says, is not an accurate representation of the traffic flow on the ground. 

“If you think a lot of changes can take place in a period of three to five years, imagine how many events can take place in a single day,” he says.

One study In Phoenix, Arizona showed that the installation of NoTraffic’s platform led to a 70 percent reduction in drivers running a red light, dramatically lowering the probability of accidents.

Up in Canada’s British Columbia, the platform resulted in a 40 percent reduction in delays for pedestrians at stop lights, without increasing congestion for other road users. 

And in Arizona, NoTraffic says it cut the time users spent on the road in half by applying its sensors to three intersections in a mile-long strip in downtown Tucson.

“We used a drone to capture the ‘before’ and ‘after’,” says Nir. “You were able to see a queue up to a mile long at one of the intersections, but after implementing NoTraffic, a mile of the queue was totally eliminated.”

A client that purchases the NoTraffic system can choose from a range of software services that the company offers, such as analytics and optimization services for police and fire departments. It essentially functions as a tool for agencies to easily implement their policies to improve their unmanaged traffic systems.

The startup is already operating in 13 US states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, and California, and has just signed up its one hundredth local Department of Transportation in North America.

Israel Driving Car Tech

Israel has become a leader in developing advanced car-tech, and global companies have been taking note. In June 2013, Waze, the sat-nav software company, was bought by Google for $1.3 billion. In March 2017, Mobileye, the advanced driver assistance system, was bought by Intel for $15.3 billion, the biggest-ever acquisition of an Israeli tech company at the time.

Today there are more than 400 automotive startups in Israel developing an array of technologies, from collision avoidance to autonomous cars, from electric vehicle batteries to AI systems that check cars for faults – and NoTraffic is one of them.

Other Israeli automotive startups include RavinAI, which has developed an artificial intelligence-enabled vehicle inspection platform; Valens, which has introduced the first rear-view camera for trucks; and Foretellix, which uses AI to teach driverless cars how to react to any situation on the road.

As for NoTraffic, which was founded in Tel Aviv and is based both in Israel and in Palo Alto, California, Nir says that most of its competitors are “legacy competitors” that sell traffic equipment to traffic authorities. 

One direct competitor is Canada’s Miovision, which also collects traffic data to improve congestion. But Nir says that unlike Miovision, NoTraffic uses a combination of technologies that makes it capable of collecting traffic data in 99.9 percent of weather conditions, whereas Miovision has to rely on different hardware for each kind of service it offers. 

In 2022, NoTraffic was included in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list, along with some of the most recognizable companies in the world, including Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Since being founded in 2017, NoTraffic has raised over $75 million in funding, including $50 million it announced last month that it had raised in a Series B round. The funding was led by M&G Investments alongside VNV Global and UMC Capital, as well as existing investors. NoTraffic plans to use these funds to aid its expansion into the UK, Japan, Italy and Germany.

“This funding is another step in our mission to revolutionize the way traffic is being managed today,” said Tal Kreisler, co-founder and CEO of NoTraffic.

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