On the Road to Innovation: Carnegie Mellon’s Traffic21 Institute is helping Pittsburgh to change transportation

Pittsburgh boasts a comparable technology with Scalable Urban Traffic Control, or Surtrac, an artificial intelligence-based system developed by the Traffic21 Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Like adaptive traffic signals, Surtrac, which was deployed at intersections in East Liberty earlier this year, responds in real-time as opposed to working on a fixed-time cycle. While the system operates similarly to PennDOT’s adaptive signals, Traffic 21 Executive Director Stan Caldwell explains that Surtrac is designed for urban grids.