Cleveland to pilot smart traffic signals

The City of Cleveland has received a $1.8 million federal Department of Transportation grant that will enable it to create traffic signal priority for emergency vehicles.

Driving the news: City Council approved the Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant last week, which will pay for consultants and other professional services to design, prototype and evaluate "intelligent, cloud-based adaptive traffic signals."

• The tech would allow emergency vehicles to request priority in real time.

Details: The city, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority and Cleveland State University worked together to identify two pilot corridors for the project — Kinsman and West 25th Street — based on transit, safety, emergency and multimodal needs.

• The signals may incorporate "optical sensor-based detection," which would eliminate the need for pedestrians to push a walk button.

Meanwhile, the Ohio Department of Transportation also received a SMART grant.

• Its $2 million award will go toward researching new highway safety technology, including using data to predict where crashes are most likely to occur.