In 1950, only 29% of the world’s population occupied urbanized spaces. Today that number has nearly doubled, with half of the growth happening in the last 10 years alone. Perhaps it goes without saying—this movement has changed the way the world operates.
The most apparent effect of this shift is reflected in traffic conditions. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, the number of hours per commuter lost to traffic delay has nearly tripled since 1982, climbing to 54 hours a year. The cost of gridlock has also grown more than tenfold to $166 billion a year, while the number of pedestrian fatalities has increased by 35% between 2008 and 2017, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. This is problematic for local governments and commuters alike.
One solution to these problems is smart cities: a concept that brings together Internet of Things (IoT) technology and artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge to help manage city wide assets and resources more effectively. The key objective is to curb the negative effects of urbanization around the globe. Many innovators have contributed to these applications; but it is companies like Safe Fleet that are at the forefront of these efforts.
Safe Fleet offers a portfolio of smart safety solutions for fleets of every type and has been working to make vehicles commonly associated with traffic incidents more intelligent. Engineering smart technology for vehicles like work trucks, fire engines, buses, police cars, and ambulances, Safe Fleet is dedicated to improving productivity on the road and reducing preventable road deaths around the world.
One cutting-edge solution from their portfolio is the Predictive Stop Arm™, which combines radar sensors mounted on school buses with predictive analytics software to monitor oncoming traffic and gauge when a stop arm violation is likely to occur. Deployed in multiple school districts across the United States, such as Indiana’s Robin Hall’s Clark-Pleasant School District, this technology allows bus drivers to take proactive safety measures, as opposed to simply reacting to threats, to keep everyone out of harm’s way. If an illegal pass is predicted, audible alerts are issued to both the bus driver and offloading students.
According to a survey conducted by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services (NASDPTS), more than 95,000 illegal passes occurred across 39 states in a single day. The Predictive Stop Arm aims to ensure none of those violations put students at risk—as does Safe Fleet’s Right-Hand Danger Zone technology, which serves a similar purpose. Integrating an external camera with predictive sensors and embedded algorithms, this technology, also mounted on school buses, alerts bus drivers to any pedestrian movement detected on the right-hand side of a bus—a typically problematic blind-spot—while the door is open, in order to increase student safety. Both solutions are part of Safe Fleet’s portfolio of smart safety solutions and have made great strides toward reducing vehicle/pedestrian incidents.
The rapid deployment of smart sensor solutions, like Predictive Stop Arm and Right-Hand Danger Zone, has created a surge in data aggregation. As a result, there is a concurrent need for more robust storage solutions to manage all of this data. For this reason, Safe Fleet has partnered with Seagate Technology to implement customized storage solutions that improve data processing, analysis, and protection. From the edge to the cloud, Seagate provides a suite of high-performing hard drive solutions that accommodate the workload, capacity, and scalability needs that accompany surveillance, AI, and smart cities applications.
For applications like Safe Fleet’s smart safety solutions that utilize both high-definition video cameras and predictive analytics software—Seagate’s SkyHawk™ AI drives, which are tuned for 24×7 workloads and optimized to support complex streams of metadata, offer the perfect solution. Seagate’s Exos® enterprise-class drives provide exceptional capacity and scalability for similar operations. And for applications using hot data, Seagate Nytro® solid-state drives provide instant data availability.
Combining Safe Fleet’s innovative technology with Seagate’s industry-tested hard drives is the optimal solution to today’s traffic management concerns. This partnership brings together smart devices and proven storage solutions to reduce latency issues, deliver quick insights on-site for real-time decision making, and prevent accidents—thus helping ensure students and drivers alike stay safe, even as city centers and urban populations continue to expand.
