Miovision is known for traffic data and management solutions. How does that impact transit?
According to the American Public Transit Association, buses consistently carry more passengers than any other form of public transit. Most routes use the same road network as the rest of vehicle traffic, so service speed and reliability are strongly influenced by how well a municipality manages its traffic network.
Balancing the needs of public transportation and other road users is an area of growing interest among our customers. That’s why, back in 2021, we developed a partnership with Global Traffic Technologies (GTT), the makers of Opticom, a leading traffic signal priority solution that provides a prioritized green light for emergency and transit vehicles.
We learned through the partnership that traffic engineers worry about signal priority’s impact on traffic and that the combination of signal priority and our smart signal platform can make traffic better for all stakeholders – whether that’s someone riding a bus to work, a delivery driver or a parent taking a carload of kids to soccer practice.
To help cities fully optimize their transportation networks, we knew we needed to address the needs of transit agencies. To that end, we finalized the acquisition of GTT in April, bringing Opticom and the team behind it into Miovision.
With this acquisition, what can Miovision offer to cities, towns and agencies aiming to optimize public transit?
For most municipalities, public transit, emergency services and traffic engineering are all separate agencies that need to coordinate their efforts to meet the needs of all stakeholders. That’s easier said than done. We offer a powerful set of solutions that can help agencies deliver reliable transit, faster emergency response, congestion reduction and improved road safety.
For public transit agencies, we can provide an effective solution for improving on-time performance for transit using the road network (typically buses). Transit signal priority (TSP) can always be on to ensure buses consistently arrive on time or agencies can use TSP only when buses are delayed, getting them back on schedule quickly. TSP can improve service reliability, on-time performance and help agencies reduce fuel consumption and brake wear.
How does the addition of transit optimization to your product portfolio drive your broader vision?
Miovision’s vision is to materially improve the quality of life for communities through the optimization of transportation networks worldwide. A generation ago many traffic engineers would have viewed this vision as being synonymous with moving as many vehicles as possible as quickly and safely as possible, but that approach has changed dramatically.
An urban transportation network impacts many aspects of urban life. It determines how easy your commute is, how quickly you can get help in an emergency and even how robust and dynamic the local economy is.
Balancing all these needs is vital and municipalities and agencies need solutions that are easy to deploy and use. That’s why our platform is based on machine vision and artificial intelligence to provide the power and the flexibility to deliver a growing range of solutions, and we are making our solutions easier to access. In April, we launched Miovision One – our transformative software platform that addresses current and future global mobility challenges. We are migrating our existing solutions to Miovision One, providing a unified interface for a seamless user experience. This creates a foundation to deliver a wide variety of transportation solutions – a big step towards helping communities around the world to easily optimize their entire traffic networks.
Cities and towns are making big investments in transit. What opportunities do you think this presents for urban mobility?
I think the key to success will be improving transit performance across the network, not merely adding a shiny new project amongst existing operations.
Big, new infrastructure projects such as new subway lines may capture a lot of attention but to achieve public policy goals, the entire transit network needs to improve. TSP can help improve on-time performance, as well as reduce fuel consumption and provide vital connections to the rest of the system.
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Kurtis McBride is chief executive officer with Miovision Technologies Incorporated.
