Peek Traffic talks signal priority capabilities

First published at ITS America - June 6, 2019

Ray Deer of Peek

Representatives at Peek Traffic are spending their time at the Annual Meeting talking about their goal to provide signal priority capabilities to intelligent transit vehicles across North America and abroad. Peek allows traffic and transit officials to use radio, WiFi and centre to centre communications to give transit vehicles traffic signal priority as they near an intersection. Schedules, real-time arrival times, current traffic flow and congestion data flows into Peek’s GREENWave ATC traffic control software where it optimises signal timing.

“There’s an art to traffic signal priority,” said Ray Deer, the company’s CTO. “You want to provide priority just enough so that buses and light rail systems stay on schedule without impacting regular traffic.”

According to Deer, Peek recently conducted a pilot in Minneapolis, that resulted in a large reduction in all vehicle delay times due to light rail prioritsations. The average reduction in vehicle delay was 32% while the number of vehicles that had to wait two minutes or longer for the train was reduced by half. The longest delay measured reduced from 11 minutes to 4 minutes.

Booth 630