Kevin Comstock wants your car to have a little chat with his traffic signal. Nothing too personal – just let it know how close you are and whether you’re turning left or right.
If your car is paying attention, his signal might tell you to speed up a bit so you’ll make it through the next six lights without stopping.
Comstock is Chattanooga’s traffic signal systems engineer, and he’s one of the key people trying to figure out how to move city traffic forward until the time driverless vehicles completely change the way our world works.
Chattanooga recently joined 76 other cities in applying for a $40 million federal Smart Cities grant not just to design a futuristic system, but actually start putting it into place. Chattanooga’s application team included the city, the Electric Power Board, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Comstock believes Chattanooga has a fair chance of winning, largely because it already has much of the infrastructure in place.