Skip to main content

Gridsmart deploys new traffic-time collection system in home city

At no cost to the city or its tax-payers, local transportation solutions company Gridsmart has deployed six of its new Streetsmart wi-fi traffic-time collection system in its home city of Knoxville. The new six-intersection traffic management area will provide real-time, comprehensive travel times, congestion mapping and traffic count data, allowing the city to study and better manage travel trends at major intersections, potentially reducing congestion. Streetsmart uses wi-fi signals generated in vehicles
April 19, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
At no cost to the city or its tax-payers, local transportation solutions company 8097 Gridsmart Technologies has deployed six of its new Streetsmart wi-fi traffic-time collection system in its home city of Knoxville.


The new six-intersection traffic management area will provide real-time, comprehensive travel times, congestion mapping and traffic count data, allowing the city to study and better manage travel trends at major intersections, potentially reducing congestion.

Streetsmart uses wi-fi signals generated in vehicles to track them as they advance through multiple devices along a city street, building data on origin destination, speed and congestion. The system archives and sends the data through the cloud, giving traffic managers a high-level overview of traffic patterns, time-stamped travel times, trouble areas as well as those caused by seasonal changes so that they can study the information over time or take immediate action to relieve congestion. It also ensures driver privacy as all of the information is collected anonymously.

As part of the initiative, the company upgraded two of their existing intersection management Gridsmart systems with updated iconic bell cameras.

In addition to helping to reduce congestion, the Streetsmart installation will become a critical piece of traffic infrastructure as Knoxville considers whether to become a test bed for connected and autonomous vehicle/smart city technologies.

Related Content

  • November 7, 2013
    Smart Spanish city trials cell-based traffic management
    David Crawford reports on an urban electronic nervous system. The northern Spanish city of Santander – historically a port - is now an emerging technology showcase attracting global attention as a prototype for a medium-sized smart city of the future. In a move to determine the optimal use of available data, it is creating a de-facto experimental laboratory for sensor and mobile phone-based urban traffic management and environmental monitoring innovations.
  • November 15, 2017
    TM 2.0 boost TMC data feed and driver influence
    TM 2.0 views connected vehicles and V2I as two-way communications channels, benefitting traffic management and drivers, as Alan Dron discovers. As connected vehicles are progressively rolled out there will come a point at which traffic managers and traffic management centres (TMCs) will have to gear up to cope with a rapidly-evolving road scenario. The TM 2.0 Platform (see box) is promoting a concept of new-generation traffic management (which carries the same TM 2.0 title) and is studying how future T
  • March 19, 2014
    Asking drivers what information they need: radical but effective
    When Texas A&M Transportation Institute was asked to devise a temporary traveller information system for work zones, it started by asking drivers what they need. Robert Brydia explains the thinking, implementation and results. US Interstate 35 (I-35) runs roughly north–south originating in Laredo, Texas and ends 1,500 miles away in Duluth, Minnesota having passed through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Iowa. Within Texas the I-35 splits into I-35E and I-35W passing through Dallas and Fort Worth respectiv
  • July 24, 2012
    Urban utility
    Steve Lane, Commercial Director at Triteq, talks about the successful deployment of ZigBee in Barcelona where a low-cost wireless metropolitan network for location and citizen services was established. The project, he says, demonstrates ZigBee's effectiveness as an urban communications system solution ZigBee is based on the IEEE radio frequency standard 802.15.4 - 2006 for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN), which provides a license-free radio frequency for a flexible, robust private wireless network. Z