City uses high-tech solutions to address traffic safety

Calgary is turning to some high-tech solutions to address traffic safety. Drones, VR headsets and AI are now being used at the traffic management centre.

Drones, virtual reality headsets and artificial intelligence (AI) are now part of the City of Calgary’s operations at the traffic management centre, a first in Canada.

Investing about $10,000 to integrate the technology with its current system, city officials hope to add more gear to monitor even more intersections and improve traffic flow and pedestrian safety.

“It gives our techs and technicians and engineers more information, more real-time information to make decisions in a real-time manner,” said Ravi Seera, acting director of mobility with the City of Calgary.

“We are looking at expanding to 10 to 15 intersections next year primarily around high pedestrian areas.”

It’s current system manages 1,300 intersections with 200 cameras.

Drone coverage

The city is also using drones to monitor traffic backups.

Each drone cost about $1,000 and weighs less than a sandwich.

Technicians can literally get a birds-eye vantage point which helps inform decisions about where and when to change the traffic lights and alleviate backups.

AI is also being used to collect data about road usage, but not about motorists, pedestrians and cyclists.

“Anything we can do that helps people get around better, easier and save time in their day, we are absolutely going to deploy every type of technology to make that happen,” said Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek.

Gondek said this data can help inform officials about areas where road improvements are needed and where infrastructure upgrades will be useful.

Road safety

The Alberta Motor Association (AMA) also used AI to complete a study about road safety to identified high-risk near-miss incidents, and reports there’s more than one close call in Canada ever single day.

Over seven months ending in February 2025, the report found one in every 770 pedestrians and one in every 500 cyclists were almost hit to a severity that would have caused serious injury or death.

“That’s where we encourage municipalities to use this real-time data, where some of these near-misses and close calls and perception issues that are reported in by the community are real,” said Dominic Schamuhn, manager of advocacy for the AMA.

Calgary Mobility officials add that no other municipality in the world is supplying images and data to Google Images and Google maps, which will also help update navigation apps.