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DENVER POST—DENVER COUNCIL APPROVES $12 MILLION SMART-TECH TEST PROGRAM

January 30, 2018

The Denver Post article explores the City of Denver’s project to ease traffic and improve pedestrian safety. A link to the full article is below.

Much like the traffic that Denver city officials hope to alleviate with the aid of new technology, the road to a future of connected vehicles is slow and plodding.

But a $12 million, four-year program that received City Council approval Tuesday aims to lay serious groundwork. Funded in part by a federal grant, the program will experiment with three threads of an emerging smart network that eventually could wirelessly tether most cars and trucks to traffic signals, signs and pavement, creating a real-time stream of information to smooth the flow of traffic.

“They are case studies in trying to establish this technology,” said Nancy Kuhn, a spokeswoman for the Denver Department of Public Works.

By focusing on those areas, Kuhn said, the city’s data and traffic experts will be better prepared to integrate and make sense of the onslaught of wireless signals that is expected in the not-so-distant future from private connected vehicles and smart infrastructure. Some of the latter is being tested out at near East 61st Avenue and Peña Boulevard as part of the Panasonic-linked Peña Station Next development.

Read the complete article at the Denver Post