With all the data companies certainly have about traffic flow, it boggles my mind that there isn't a company out there selling city-wide "traffic light optimization" where they come in, analyze the data, and set the traffic lights to optimize traffic flow. Heck, sell it as a subscription where the analysis continues running and factors in things like major events or road closures automatically.
Noise and air pollution would go down. Time waiting in traffic would go down. Crashes would go down.
Of all the things that have been optimized in the worod today by algorithmic analysis of data, it just surprises me that this hasn't been one of them.
Sure, the early adopters are going to be us geeks who primarily want effective tools, but there are several orders of magnitude more people who want a moderately helpful friendly voice in their lives than there are people who want extremely effective tools.
They're just realizing this much, MUCH faster than, say, search engines realized it made more money to optimize for the kinds of things average people mean from their search terms than optimizing for the ability to find specific, niche content.