There are very few opportunities to widen roads within Pittsburgh,” says Karina Ricks, director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure. “That’s a bygone era. Even if we could, that just means we’re using up valuable real estate where we could be building businesses, housing, parkland.”

Carnegie Mellon has pioneered a lot of this technology. CMU spinout Rapid Flow Technologies has been collecting data from smart traffic signals in East Liberty for several years with a technology called Surtrac.