SignalGuru: a smartphone app that manages speed at traffic light zones

The truth is that it is quite annoying to encounter avenues or streets with traffic lights that are completely out of sync with one another, forcing us to stop and start off again more than once, with the additional fuel consumption that this entails. But engineers at the MIT found the solution in an app for your smartphone.

The app is called SignalGuru and makes it possible to calculate the speed at which you need to drive so that you don’t get unlucky and hit every red light, thus speeding up your journey when driving along a street with many junctions controlled by traffic lights.

So far the app has been tested on several streets, with more or less mixed results. According to its creators, its performance will improve once the mobile device equipped with SignalGuru has more users interacting with each other to exchange data about the status of signals on various streets or across entire areas of a city.

What is strange (and truly worrying) is that we need an app on our phone to tell us what speed to drive at in certain circumstances, completely undermining our perception as drivers.