A 3-mile stretch of Interstate 94 in Michigan will become America’s first smart highway.
Axios Alphabet-backed startup Cavnue has begun construction of a smart highway as part of a new pilot project that could spur other construction projects across the country, according to reports. Two more highways are reportedly in the works in Austin, Texas, and elsewhere in the southwest Cavnue site.
The new smart road is a big, long vehicle tracking system for the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and highway drivers. A smart highway is designed to send information such as traffic updates, weather conditions, driving conditions and stranded vehicles in hopes of relieving traffic congestion, preventing accidents and responding to road emergencies more effectively.
The freeway pilot program is located between Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan. Once the pilot program is complete, there are future plans to extend the smart highway for another 40 miles in six phases that will connect both cities.
The smart highway works with a series of pylons placed every 200 meters (about 655 feet) along the road, which hold sensor pods, computing pods and communications equipment. There are also cameras that monitor every part of the highway and capture images that are analyzed by artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to identify dangerous driving conditions. Alerts are sent to MDOT and drivers connected to the road.
So far, the system can only talk to autonomous or semi-autonomous cars, but Cavnue expects that by 2030, half of all cars will have some level of autonomy.
When it comes to building and implementing smart highways, America has some work to do. Great Britainfor example, in 2014, it started working on the first road connected to the Internet.
