While Baton Rouge still uses 4G technology for its school flashers, traffic signals and emergency preemption, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s revived half-cent sales tax proposal potentially could serve as the city’s chance to upgrade those devices to 5G.
The proposed tax would raise about $912 million to fund several transportation infrastructure projects, including $40 million for parishwide traffic signal synchronization. Cities in Singapore and Spain are already beginning to move all wireless to 5G as part of a “smart city” vision, where vehicles, roads and other infrastructure are connected.
Smart city technology is also being leveraged in Columbus, Ohio, where a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation allows applications to test the potential for reducing traffic congestion, automatically report needed road repairs and let self-driving cars and trucks communicate so they can flow in coordinated groups.
Similarly, Broome’s plan includes provisions for advanced traffic management, synchronization and communication items, but her office is hesitant to say whether the city’s cellular-connected devices would be upgraded to 5G, if the tax passes.
“5G technology will certainly be considered, but we will not make final decisions on particular technologies until we study all of our options,” Broome says in a prepared statement.
Broome’s office says the mayor will seek out “smart data” transportation experts in order to weigh the pros and cons of buying today’s best available technology versus waiting another few years. Regardless, the new technologies will need to work hand-in-hand with the city-parish’s existing infrastructure.
While “5G” and “Internet of Things” have become buzz words in the tech sector, chief traffic engineer Ingolf Partenheimer says 5G hasn’t spilled over to the mainstream cellular realm in Louisiana yet. But when it does, he doesn’t expect immediate upgrades to the city’s 500 traffic signals until 4G becomes obsolete.
“It’s a matter of when the 4G becomes more expensive than the 5G,” Partenheimer says.
Still, Partenheimer says Baton Rouge will soon see “some cool smart city stuff,” with traffic engineers changing detection and controllers to analyze smart metrics with timing patterns.
Stan Prutz, president and CEO of QDS Systems, says the Internet of Things is the “next big thing” his engineering firm is studying (last week, it was “cobots”), and 5G plays a major role in it.
“You always want to try to use the latest possible version that’s out there,” Prutz says. “The history is that, if you don’t, it’s going to have short life.”
