Skip to main content

Connected Signals improves driver safety in Florida

Connected Signals is providing drivers in Gainesville, Florida, with real-time predictive traffic information to let them know when traffic lights are going to change. The company says sharing the data with vehicles and drivers can improve fuel efficiency by 8-15% and reduce red-light crashes by 25%. Aggregated real-time signal information, fed through predictive algorithms, is sent to Gainesville drivers via the company’s Enlighten mobile app. The app will eventually be integrated with connected car dis
September 5, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
8440 Connected Signals is providing drivers in Gainesville, Florida, with real-time predictive traffic information to let them know when traffic lights are going to change. The company says sharing the data with vehicles and drivers can improve fuel efficiency by 8-15% and reduce red-light crashes by 25%.


Aggregated real-time signal information, fed through predictive algorithms, is sent to Gainesville drivers via the company’s Enlighten mobile app. The app will eventually be integrated with connected car displays and powertrains, the company says.

App features include red light countdowns and green-wave speed indicators which are intended to help drivers make decisions such as slowing down sooner or taking their foot off the pedal and coasting to the light.

The green wave speed indicator helps drivers safely adjust their speed to get into a wave of green lights and avoid stopping, the company adds.  

Connected Signals started working with Gainesville last year as part of the University of Florida Transportation Institute’s I-Street testbed – an initiative to trial connected and autonomous vehicle technology. The project was developed in collaboration with 4503 Florida Department of Transportation (FDoT).

According to Connected Signals, nearly all of Gainesville’s traffic signals are now online with its smart signal information.

Emmanuel Posadas, traffic operations manager at the City of Gainesville, says Connected Signals provides the technology and support at no cost to municipalities if they allow data sharing.

Matt Ginsberg, CEO and co-founder of Connected Signals, says: “This programme has been successful in Gainesville, and we are now working with other agencies in Florida, as part of FDoT’s initiative, that we expect to be able to announce by the end of the year.”

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Smarter mapping makes for more informed decisions
    December 2, 2016
    Following his keynote presentation at the 2016 ITS World Congress in Melbourne, ITS International caught up with Esri founder Jack Dangermond. It is getting close to half a century ago that Jack Dangermond and his wife Laura founded the Environmental Research Systems Institute – known today as Esri - of which he remains president.
  • Tecsidel’s Pan-American Highway tunnel eases Lima’s traffic woes
    December 4, 2018
    The Pan-American Highway connects the US and Canada with Latin America, running for thousands of miles from Alaska in the north to Argentina in the south. Mauro Nogarin finds that one tunnel built underneath it is now providing relief for thousands of travellers each day On the Pan-American Highway, the lengthy series of roads which spans both American continents - from the US state of Alaska to the Latin American country of Argentina - ITS solutions are many and varied. One of these, in Peru’s capital
  • Getting to the point
    September 4, 2018
    Cars are starting to learn to understand the language of pointing – something that our closest relative, the chimpanzee, cannot do. And such image recognition technology has profound mobility implications, says Nils Lenke Pointing at objects – be it with language, using gaze, gestures or eyes only – is a very human ability. However, recent advances in technology have enabled smart, multimodal assistants - including those found in cars - to action similar pointing capabilities and replicate these human qual
  • Canadian authorities convinced of enforcement safety benefits
    November 28, 2012
    Cost-benefit analysis invariably finds highly in favour of speed and red light enforcement, particularly so in Edmonton in the Alberta province of Canada, where authorities need no convincing of the merits of road safety engineering. Justification of enforcement efforts on economic grounds has been reinforced this year, by a study of the costs and benefits of red light enforcement. New York-based economic research firm John Dunham & Associates carried out this latest analysis for American Traffic Solutions