Historically, city buses have not had a reputation for being as reliable, frequent, or as fast as other vehicles. In this recorded webinar, our presenters address the challenges public transportation faces, including competition with vehicle traffic, and lack of dedicated public transit lanes that allow buses and other surface street transit options to navigate efficiently. They also address how all of that can change with the right technology, such as next-generation transit signal priority.
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Follow-up Webinar Q&A — Using AI to Optimize Public Transit Operations with Next Gen Traffic Signal Priority
Digi International co-hosted a recent webinar on an innovation in public transportation with Converge Technology Solutions. In this recorded webinar, our presenters discussed the power of new technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to deliver next-generation signal priority for surface street transit and how municipalities can revolutionize their public transit options and increase ridership. This led to some great questions from attendees, below. If you have additional questions, be sure to reach out.
Moderator: Mitch Sinon, Senior Marketing Manager, Digi International
Presenters:
- Duane Oertell, Sales Director, Converge Technology Solutions
- Adrian Pearmine, Western Mobility Technology Solutions Leader, STV
- AJ O’Connor, Director of Intelligent Transportation Systems, TriMet
- Steve Mazur, Director, Public Sector, Digi International
What are TriMet’s plans for expanding the use of TSP for the buses for the rest of the Portland metro area?
AJ: Yeah, I would just say that we are not turning off the existing IR, where the old legacy system exists, that's still running.
We have prioritized high capacity routes, similar to that division transit project, and we are in the planning stages for several major expansions of TSP.
Does TriMet see other potential use of AI in your transit organization? If yes, what are they?
AJ: Yes, we're looking at AI, but what we're trying to do first is have a firm policy of how we're going to implement AI and use it.
For those of you that are interested in that, I would suggest you look to the City of San Jose which has a really good policy on AI.
We're basically in the phase where we're looking at setting up a policy before we dive into any kind of chat GPT or anything like that.
AJ, were there any challenges in getting your partner traffic agencies on board with the technology and architecture that you selected? If yes, what were some of the issues and how did you handle them?
AJ: Yeah, Absolutely. There were some issues.
As you can imagine, anybody that's in IT when you come to somebody and say, hey, we're going to put this computer in your server room and run it over your network. Are you OK with that? The answer is usually no. So, there was kind of an initial challenge regarding that.
We were able to address that with very specific firewalls on either side of their device from Palo Alto.
And Palo Alto was a great partner with us in helping us configure those firewalls specifically to limit the traffic that goes in and out of those firewalls to standardize national standardized message sets. And they were great to work with regarding that.
And once we worked with Palo Alto and showed the capabilities to our traffic partners, they were confident enough then to let us move forward with that device in their server rooms.
This question is around cellular carriers and running dual cellular. Is it better to run WAN bonding or failover/failback, as shown in one of your diagrams?
AJ: We're not running dual. We don't have two cards in the Digi router right now. We have a singular card, and we're with Verizon on a private network.
I don't believe we're using WAN bonding at this point.
So, cellular carriers already encrypt data transmissions over LTE and 5G. Is it worth the trouble to try to set up an IPsec VPN?
AJ: That's essentially what we have. We have a private network set up already. Because as I just mentioned we're transmitting over that Digi router and cellular connection. We're transmitting a lot of data, not just for TSP, but all our fare revenue data.
So, if you walk onto our bus and tap with your credit card, that's going over the same cellular connection.
With AI based TSP, do the buses generally move faster than the cars along congested corridors? Or have you been able to monitor that?
AJ: Well, I guess it depends on if you actually mean speed. What's more important is very reliable service. You can see that the delay is definitely decreased. So it's not like you're going from 30 miles an hour to 40 miles an hour or anything like that. It's just that you're consistently getting green lights, which, depending on how you perceive faster — yes, it's faster.
Adrian: The buses are not moving faster than cars, if that was the question.
But what we did do was look at other data as well. We didn't cover this in our slides just because of time, but we looked at corridor performance for vehicles as well as buses, and it did not have any degradation in service of regular vehicles on the corridor.
And since they're sharing the same extended green signals that we are, they cleared those intersections and we're performing just as well along the corridor. But buses don't move faster than cars.