Phoenix subcommittee advances smart-city technologies for transit, traffic, waste and water

The City of Phoenix Transportation Infrastructure & Planning Subcommittee heard multi-department briefings May 20 on smart-city investments that officials said aim to improve safety, reduce delays and give residents earlier notice of utility issues.

Assistant Street Transportation Director Matt Wilson described one of the nation’s larger connected-vehicle efforts, the Connected Vehicle Acceleration Zone (CVAZ), saying the program — led by Maricopa County in partnership with nearby cities and the Arizona Department of Transportation — is supported by a $20,000,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant to accelerate V2X deployment. “This is one of the largest CV2X deployments in the nation,” Wilson said, describing plans to equip hundreds of intersections and hundreds of vehicles in the region.

Wilson also described NoTraffic’s AI-driven detection system, which uses computer-vision cameras and radar to identify vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists and to support adaptive signal timing. He said pilot deployments have shown reductions in vehicle delays of up to 40% and travel-time drops of about 25% where the system is in use.

Public Works Deputy Eduardo Rodriguez and solid-waste staff outlined upgrades to routing and material-processing systems. Rodriguez said the department serves more than 425,000 households weekly and has added optical sorters and AI-powered robots at materials recovery facilities, increasing processing capacity from roughly 20 tons per hour to about 33 tons per hour and improving commodity value.

Water and wastewater presenters described technologies intended to speed maintenance and protect treatment systems. Nazario Prieto, an assistant director in the water department, said Sewer AI has cut the video review cycle from about 15–19 years to an expected 5–7 years, doubling the annual CCTV inspection output from approximately 300 miles to roughly 600 miles. Prieto described SmartCover sensors that monitor manhole levels (57 units deployed) to target cleaning and a CanDo monitoring pilot that flags anomalies in wastewater quality to help identify illicit discharges.

On the water-distribution side, Assistant Water Services Director Keith Mojica described acoustic leak-detection tools and an iHydrant pressure-monitoring collar (12 units installed) that his team uses to detect pressure changes and reduce non-revenue water. He and Water Services Director Brandy Kelso also outlined a city plan to move from automated meter reading (AMR) to advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). Mojica said AMI deployment is expected to take roughly 5–6 years with about 77,093 endpoints installed annually during the rollout and endpoint equipment costs estimated at $20–$24 million per year. The system will transmit near-real-time reads, provide customer portal access for daily usage data and can send leak notifications when continuous usage is detected for 24–48 hours.

Council members asked about privacy, enforcement and data security. When asked whether the NoTraffic system or detection cameras would read license plates or be used for enforcement, Wilson said the detection system is configured for operational insights and research, not enforcement, and described it as “completely anonymous in terms of it does not do any tracking of any particular user.” On AMI data resilience, staff said meters keep roughly 40 days of local history so uploads missed during an outage can be recovered when systems are restored.

The subcommittee also took routine procedural actions: it approved the minutes and a consent item to extend a transit scheduling software upgrade and maintenance agreement; both were approved by voice vote as recorded in the meeting. No roll-call tallies were listed in the transcript.

Staff said implementation will proceed across departments, with CVAZ installations and NoTraffic deployments ongoing, Sewer AI and SmartCover continuing to scale, and AMI pre-work under way with endpoint installations expected to begin later in the year.