Google’s parent Alphabet has a new startup that hopes to do away with traffic jams, or at least make them more bearable.
We all go through unbearably heavy traffic at certain times of the week, or even every day in many cases. But Alphabet’s smart city startup Sidewalk Labs could at least help alleviate traffic in a big way. The company announced this week that it is working on a new platform called Flow that would assist cities in monitoring and crunching traffic data in real time, allowing them to reroute heavy traffic and make routes less congested.
Flow will also leverage the traffic data Google collects, and continues to collect through Maps and Waze, and would help city officials come up with ways to reduce congestion and make transportation more accessible to those in most need. According to Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff, the new platform can potentially “shorten commute times and provide reliable transport options for all citizens.”
It’s interesting to note that Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs will be making one of the seven cities in the U.S. government’s “smart city” competition finals as the pilot city for Flow. The seven finalists include Austin, Columbus, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland (Ore.), and San Francisco.
Sidewalk Labs was once under the Google umbrella, but was spun off from the company last year. It is now an independent firm under Alphabet, which now handles most of Google’s non-search-related projects. And since the startup’s role within Alphabet is to leverage technology to solve infrastructure problems in cities, its projects may have implications for its sister companies and other arms within Alphabet. For instance, a city’s ability to crunch traffic data would make it more conducive to self-driving cars, which have long been a Google/Alphabet pet project.