As cities are becoming more and more connected, 3rd party developers have an incredible amount of infrastructure in place. Be it CCTV cameras, radar sensors on roads, and tons of other monitoring devices. While there is an incredible amount of innovation going on in just about every single industry in the private sector, the public sector has yet to catch up. However, there are initiative and companies that are working to help speed up the public sector innovation.
One such company is MetroTech. Essentially, MetroTech is a sort-of real time Waze. MetroTech has devised a platform that, “creates real-time traffic information from any video stream and stores it in a data warehouse in the cloud where it can be analyzed and published via the web to applications, mobile phones, and connected vehicles.”1 Currently, MetroTech is working exclusively with governments, but they hope to enter the private sector somewhere down the road:
MetroTech’s ultimate goal is to create a data publishing business for real time traffic data using the existing network infrastructure. MetroTech plans to serve as a 3rd party traffic data clearinghouse to connect the government infrastructure with the public and private infrastructure, receiving inputs from camera feeds, sensors and GPS probes to create a fully integrated traffic vision center from which data will be published to client markets in real time.2
We had a chance to speak with the MetroTech representative at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) Technology Showcase last Thursday. We learned a bit about how they collect all of the traffic data:
