Early October 2025, I shared the news from Waco (TX), where we kicked off a project with four use cases, each grounded in hard data to measure impact on people, tax revenue, safety, livability, operational efficiency of transit, and event experience. Funded through a SMART Grant Stage 1, we believe each initiative needs to be able to answer:
If we can’t prove that technology enables measurable benefits for people and businesses — why bother?
Talking to Transportation and Transit people, they fall roughly in three categories: (1) Visionary, (2) Frustrated, (3) Complacent (or Comfortable), shifting between them as the day progresses. Today, to showcase category 1, I’m sharing some of the use cases that are operational in Marysville and Dublin (OH), a region northwest of Columbus with a strong visionary mindset bringing policy, objectives, economic growth, safety, and wellbeing together to drive technology vendors towards demonstrating technologies and measuring impact. Search for the Ohio’s 33 Smart Corridor and the Envision Dublin Community Plan – Mobility and Transportation to be inspired.
For us, this provided and excellent opportunity to answer the question what the results would be if we seamlessly deployed multi-mode traffic flow optimization on the city networks covering downtowns, business districts, school zones, roundabouts, freeway interchanges, and so forth. We formed two demonstration projects with a total of 46 intersections and one roundabout.
The technology is now operational for over a year, continuously refined in software, hardened in daily operations, and tuned by data. What started as a demonstration has become that proof of how policy, people, software, and field systems can act as one, optimizing signals based on city priorities, adapting automatically to demand, and measuring results in people’s experience.
The learnings are embedded in our methodology, but looking back, these should have been some of the use case we could have made explicit:
Support council with mobility initiatives to implement Dublin (OH) – A Global City of Choice
- Use Case: Mode switch to highly prioritize pedestrians throughout the city
- Technology: Multi-mode traffic flow optimization (Traffic Flow Engine (TFE) + AI Edge sensors + existing infrastructure)
- Results: 28% reduction of pedestrian wait time while vehicles also improved over 2%
Increase truck flow in Marysville (OH)
- Use Case: Reduce delay and emissions by trucks
- Technology: Traffic Flow Engine with relative high priority for trucks
- Results: 15% delay reduction for Trucks (all other modes also benefited). Trucks emitted 17% less greenhouse gases.
Reduce incidents on main corridor
- Use Case: In real-time, allocate with high frequency green based on highest demand by mode priority
- Technology: Traffic Flow Engine with ability to omit, shorten, extend phases while adhering to all safety measures
- Results: Dublin reported 75% incident reduction
Increase Safety – Eliminate back spill unto freeway
- Use Case: Allocate sufficient green to reduce the queue length into the city network
- Technology: Extent monitoring with one AI Edge sensor and TFE scenario
- Results: Near 100% elimination of back spill
Other use cases implemented are e.g., dynamic increasing green for school buses leaving the high school, red-light delay reduction of Transit, removal of pedestrian recall by using AI Edge sensors already deployed, and I’m sure there are others we should have been explicit about up front.
The point really is that with one implementation of a central system, the cities are enabled to layer on policy implementations like removal of street parking after citizens are guided to parking garages (behavior change), metering inflow into the roundabout which has a disproportional number of incidents (all through software), snowplow red-light delay reduction, a mobile app to pride vision impaired or other groups who need more time to cross the ability to request extending crossing time, integration with 911 ops center to provide green throughout the route to the person in need for the officers. Early next year, we’ll start forming these initiatives and I can’t wait for the workshops!
If you see yourself among the visionaries, let’s translate your ideas into concrete use cases that deliver measurable impact.
If you’re frustrated, let’s channel that energy into forming partnerships that turn intent into results.
And if you’ve grown comfortable, perhaps take a moment to explore why I believe your community deserves more … or don’t call at all.
This is built to scale and fit seamless on your existing infrastructure. I’d love to learn about your opportunities and challenges, and share how we form projects, align people, secure funding, realize cost savings, and drive results. In our experience, technology is rarely the hardest part, success depends on the people, processes, and relationships that bring it to life.