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www.liveablecities.com
Founded in 2007, LED Roadway Lighting Ltd. is a Canadian clean technology company headquartered in Nova Scotia. The company’s smart street lighting products are used worldwide in over 60 countries.
Liveable Cities, a division of LED Roadway Lighting, provides smart city solutions that empower municipalities to leverage their existing street lighting infrastructure to garner valuable new insights about their community.
Founded in 2007, LED Roadway Lighting Ltd. is a Canadian clean technology company headquartered in Nova Scotia. The company’s smart street lighting products are used worldwide in over 60 countries.
Liveable Cities, a division of LED Roadway Lighting, provides smart city solutions that empower municipalities to leverage their existing street lighting infrastructure to garner valuable new insights about their community.
Upgrading city infrastructure with smart technology poses many challenges, not the least of which is how these projects will be financed1. Because of budget constraints, projects with obvious benefits that leverage existing infrastructure have better odds of being implemented.
Speed poses serious challenges for cities large and small. According to the World Health Organization (WHO)2, speed is a key risk factor in road traffic injuries. In the world’s developed countries, approximately 30% of all traffic fatalities are directly related to speed. Indeed, an average speed of only 1 km/hour over a posted limit results in a 3% higher risk of a crash, and 4-5% higher risk of fatality. The speed of vehicles involved in a crash also affect outcomes. Death is 20 times more likely if vehicles are travelling at 80 km/hour versus 30 km/hour.
Municipalities are looking at strategies to reduce vehicle speed to prevent traffic accidents and associated injuries and fatalities. The WHO discusses speed enforcement as effective but cautions that the impact of enforcement measures is short-lived. If cities were able to obtain real-time speed information throughout their jurisdictions, they could implement measures to reduce speed, assess their effectiveness over time and make adjustments as needed.
We worked with Sierra Wireless in the past for our streetlights and knew that we could count on the engineering team for support.
Ken Cartmill,
Vice President, Product Development
As a leading street lighting manufacturer, LED Roadway wanted to transform basic street lighting into a sensor network capable of providing speed data to cities. They designed a Tool-less Sensor Platform (TSP) ANSI Controller that can add sensors to any street light from any vendor, to evaluate traffic patterns with doppler radar. A key challenge remaining was a low cost, simple way to connect these sensors to their cloud platform.
Liveable Cities determined that the most reliable and cost-effective way to gather data was via LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) cellular communications. The company selected Sierra Wireless’ Ready-to-Connect HL7800 embedded module for the TSP ANSI Controller. The HL7800 is the industry’s smallest multi-mode LPWA module offering best-in-class power performance for global LTE-M, NB-IoT, and GNSS networks.
“We worked with Sierra Wireless in the past for our streetlights and knew that we could count on the engineering team for support,” explained Ken Cartmill, Vice President, Product Development. “Sierra Wireless gave our team access to their labs to evaluate antenna options, and this really streamlined the entire development process.”
TSP-Radar allows customers to simply and cost effectively deploy a city-wide speed monitoring network and speed enforcement planning function to have maximum safety impact. Compatible with a standard ANSI receptacle, TSP-Radar can be installed in 15 seconds, generates field data at low cost, and allows cities to develop location-based speed calming plans prioritized based on volume and severity of incidents. Data from the TSP-Radar sensor is sent to SmartLinx, the company’s cloud platform for analysis, and so city planners can monitor sites, evaluate the effectiveness of speed calming measures, and make adjustments. SmartLinx software is offered on a subscription plan, with hardware, connectivity, and actionable reports all built into a single low monthly price.
Sierra Wireless gave our team access to their labs to evaluate antenna options, and this really streamlined the entire development process.
Ken Cartmill,
Vice President, Product Development
The award-winning TSP-Radar was launched in late 2019. Mr. Cartmill informs, “We’ve received excellent feedback from our customers, and they are realizing how the iterative evaluation possible with real-time data from their jurisdictions is going to help them deploy the right measures to reduce speed and continually adjust to ensure program efficacy.”
With its first smart city application under its belt, the company is now looking at other applications that can leverage the same streetlight infrastructure. “Now that we can help cities understand traffic volume and speed, a logical next step is to help them understand the impact of congestion. How is congestion affecting air quality? Does the addition of a designated bike lane help reduce traffic congestion? Or does adjusting traffic signal timing further decrease or alter traffic patterns? “With smart cities, municipalities want to shift to evidence-based decision making with measurable outcomes of their initiatives, and our new products are designed to provide this evidence.” Pollution, noise, and camera sensors will be commercial in 2020 to further provide provide municipalities with a cost-effective solution to enable safer and more efficient communities using existing street lighting infrastructure.
Liveable Cities
NAM,
Canada
Public Lighting
Smart City
Ready-to-Connect HL7800 Embedded Module
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