The world road network is increasing and by 2050 it is estimated it will be spanning over 25 million kilometers. Our roads present human advancement in engineering innovations and technology in our modern world.
Roads were defined as known routes with informal construction and maintenance. Egyptians are known to construct the oldest roads sometimes between 2200 and 2600 BC. In the city of Ur there are traces of paved streets which date back to 4000 BC. In England, we have timbered engineered roads called timber track causeway built 3807 BC during winter or spring 3806 BC. In India, brick-paved streets were discovered as early as 3000 BC. In 312 BC The Roman empire were experts in constructing straight strong stone roads with the help of military help. The Roman Empire had interconnections of 29 major paved roads around 78,000 kilometers. Roads have evolved over time with the influence of revolutions and the rise of different governance.
Classes of roads
Trunk road – Their fundamental capacity is to encourage local dispersion of traffic (intercity connections). They might be national or common streets and the kind of roads found in this class are expressways, dual carriageway, single carriageway primary streets.
Primary distributor Roads – It forms the primary networks of the whole urban area connection. All traffic is determined by these roads and they have restricted access, highly fairly speed and are huge.
District roads – They are minor district distributor roads that connect various residential, business premises and links between the primary network roads within residential premises.
Local road distributors – they link to district roads.
Residential roads – They help people access their houses and also can help people enjoy their exercise activities like running and jogging.
Different associations are researching in engineering to come up with different technologies that apply AI and machine learning to develop more advanced cognitive systems that utilize big data. This could result in innovations in the road network construction which are reliable, durable and which reduce congestion and traffic. Some latest roads innovations which we pride of being;
Pollution-friendly roads
Pollution is not only contributing to one out of eight deaths world, but it cost the world around £3-4 trillion every year.
To measure pollutions organizations like EarthSense Systems has created AI-controlled air quality sensors that can help deal with this declining air quality, especially in urban cities. Utilizing AI, these sensors give continuous estimations of different air quality components to enable governments to address explicit air issues. These can install in the streets and monitor everything.
Reliable road maintenance.
Infrastructure requires continued maintenance and repair. The cost of maintaining and repairing these roads is not the only problem hindering these projects, but also how smart to conduct this maintenance. Enter Roadbotics, a system that utilizes data using AI innovation to sensor road damage and reports the conditions in real-time to city experts to help in fixing damages that could have taken a long time to detect. This data is captured through a cell phone application, which faces the street before a vehicle and observes the area, size, and level of street dangers for investigation.
Traffic control
IBM has been working on cameras controlled traffic light which has a patent granted. The traffic light has been controlled by a timer which
AI is becoming more real and applicable to different organizations with the rate which everyone could not think of. We have to sit back and watch what this magic of AI, ML, and IoT will give us or which solutions it will solve or it will create more problems.
