On October 4, 2025, we were celebrating receiving Notice to Proceed for the Waco (TX) SMART Grant Stage 1 project, modeled on a simple principle:
If we can’t prove that technology enables measurable benefits for people and businesses — why bother?
Funded by the U.S. DOT SMART Grant, the Waco Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) will implement our multi-mode traffic-flow optimization and AI-Edge sensing solution to deliver tangible community outcomes:
- Downtown Vitality — Optimize green-time allocation for passenger vehicles and pedestrians to increase walking activity, downtown visits, and local sales. Measured by pedestrian counts, surveys, and sales-tax trends.
- Transit Priority — Near-elimination of red-light delay for all buses entering or leaving the transit center. Measured by travel-time reduction.
- Student Mobility & Safety — Reduce travel time and improve safety between student housing and services across the freeway. Measured by micromobility volumes, delay reduction, and user-experience surveys.
- Event Access — Enhance access to the basketball arena, improving the experience of arriving, parking, walking, and returning home. Measured by ease-of-travel feedback and travel-time data.
The MPO will provide leadership, before-and-after measurements, results analysis, and communication. They will hold us accountable for delivering and operating the complete technical solution across 35 intersections within six months — installing, configuring, validating, and continuously refining performance while capturing high-density traffic and outcome data. Together, we will focus on making a positive impact on the experience of people in the streets, in their cars or on the bus, of shop owners being successful, of students enjoying services and cheering on their basketball team.
In short, together, we will demonstrate how measurable improvements in traffic flow, safety, and experience make Waco a more desirable place to live, visit, and do business.
This project reflects we are entering the next phase of U.S. transportation evolution, as evidence continues to show that traditional Transit Signal Priority, Adaptive, and Coordinated systems do not deliver material benefits under today’s urban pressures: Rising congestion, high roadway mortality, and the excessive cost of transit operations. We provide the hard data to show that a policy-driven, multi-mode traffic-flow optimization approach provides the control cities need to maximize the return on infrastructure and transit investments by allocating green-time dynamically based on real-time demand and city-defined priorities at the network, corridor, segment, intersection, and approach levels.