This Startup's Video Tech Counts Cars to Eliminate Traffic Hell

Back in college at the University of Waterloo, Kurtis McBride used to spend his days sitting at the side of the road, counting cars. It was one of his many tasks as an intern at a traffic engineering company--tallying the cars that drove through the intersection and reporting the data back to his bosses, who would use the intel to shorten a red light here, extend a red light there. Three years later, he says, they would do it all over again. For a young engineer eager to exercise his technical chops, this approach seemed archaic. "We're taking a combination of data that's collected once every three years for a day and is accurate if you're lucky, and we're deploying it on 30-year-old infrastructure," he says. "We're not taking advantage of the progress we've seen in other industries."