Cities Use AI to Help Ambulances and Firetrucks Arrive Faster

Researchers at NYU Tandon’s C2SMARTER, a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center, have started creating a “digital twin” of some streets in Harlem, mimicking traffic behavior and patterns to improve New York City Fire Department’s response times. Institute Associate Professor Joseph Chow, C2SMARTER’s deputy director, hopes to do real-time simulations, testing out, for example, which vehicle might be in the best location to respond to an emergency. “We’re still in the lab stage now,” says Chow, whose team is getting all the data in place to train the AI-based traffic prediction system. By the summer, “we should have something more substantial.”