The traditional way to analyze city traffic is often time-consuming and tedious. But a Canadian company, Kitchener, Ont.-based Miovision, has launched a new tool that promises to do that job almost instantly.

The new platform — known as Traffic Studies for Miovision One — marries traffic flow data with intersection management through a single product.

The new tool on its platform gives a city "real-time operational insights into what’s happening,” Kurtis McBride, chief executive officer of Miovision, told TechNX in an interview.

It operates by understanding traffic trends and patterns, then offering artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to city traffic managers.

“Let’s count for eight hours during the day to understand what that flow of traffic looks like, and then they’ll design timing plans, which is essentially the light changing from red, yellow to green," he said.

"Let’s say 70 per cent of the traffic is going northbound on Kipling, we try to give 70 per cent of the green light time to that northbound direction,” McBride continued, using Toronto as an example, where Miovision's technology is installed in 100 of the city's intersections.

“This helps cities to understand and optimize traffic flow in an intersection network,” he said.

Managing traffic flows

The system works through its AI agent, Mateo, and it allows traffic managers to talk directly to it, McBride explained.

“The city can actually have a conversation with their traffic data: tell me where my most unsafe intersection is, or tell me where my most congested intersection is, and then it allows them to target things where they’re going to do a signal optimization,” McBride said.

Miovision, he continued, specializes in distilling a very complicated network in big cities like Toronto to "actionable insights that allow cities to take steps to improve the drive for citizens."

The company got its start 21 years ago at the University of Waterloo. Today, the company is approaching 500 employees and has offices in the U.S., Germany, Mexico, Dubai and Singapore, according to McBride. Its systems operate in more than 68 countries.

Benefits for efficiency, safety

By deploying the Miovision technology, traffic planners are able to solve a wide variety of problems, such as reducing congestion, improving safety and allowing public transit vehicles to move more efficiently, McBride said.

“We provide a lot of benefits that are fundamentally about efficiency and safety of the network, and we just do that in a much more cost-effective and much more data-driven way than many of the incumbents in our industry.”

The cost of congestion to the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) alone is enormous, according to a 2024 study by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario and the Ontario Road Builders’ Association. It pegged the issue as costing $44.7 billion per year in lost productivity and the anxiety of being stuck in traffic.

“I’m sure as a driver, you’ve experienced it. There’s the economic cost," McBride said. "There’s also, do you arrive stressed, or do you just stay home because you don’t want to deal with the traffic?"

Toronto, he noted, is one of the most congested cities in North America.

Miovision's Mateo AI

These headaches can be mitigated by Miovision’s Mateo, which he likens to a “PhD-level traffic engineer.” Large language models like Mateo have "read every single textbook on traffic engineering that they could find,” he said.

By deploying this tool, the time savings for cities can be substantial. In Detroit, the city has 100 per cent coverage from Miovision, so when a complaint comes in, the system’s intelligence gets to work.

“If a citizen says, ‘Hey that left turn on Tuesdays in the afternoon seems like a real gong show,’ that email flows into them through a customer management system called SeeClickFix," a tool Detroit uses to log complaints.

In the past, going through reports and coming up with a solution and then implementing it could take a week or more to accomplish, explained McBride. “Now what happens is when they come in on Monday, Mateo has already read the email, gone into the data, found whether there is actually an issue.”

If there is a problem, "it’ll characterize it, build a report, make a set of recommendations, and essentially when (workers) come in, it says, ‘Do you want me to fix this with my solution that I’ve come up with?’” he said.

It also offers various cost savings such as 10 to 30 per cent less fuel burning during traffic stops and starts, McBride said. And for those cars that have connected vehicles, Miovision can send data to help drivers make informed driving decisions.

“If you have a vehicle that supports that capability, as you’re driving up to the intersection, it’s telling you, ‘Instead of driving the speed limit and then stopping and then having to start again, why don’t you drive 40 per cent of the speed limit?’" McBride said.

"And then by the time you get to the stop, the light will have turned green, so you don’t have to stop and risk getting hit from behind, or burn a lot of fuel when you have to accelerate.”