Customer Story: Smart Traffic Flows with LiDAR & ITS - Forum Virium Helsinki, Finland
23/09/2025
A visualization of the road patterns.
Helsinki is facing increasing congestion during rush hours. Traffic hotspots cause delays for cars, cyclists, and pedestrians; safety concerns rise at intersections and crosswalks; and city planners lack reliable, real-time data about traffic flows to support infrastructure planning. Forum Virium Helsinki is the hub to co-create the future’s smart cities by working with companies, universities, public organisations and residents. Together with Flasheye, they had the chance to integrate and evaluate new technology in the forefront.
The challenge
The city environment has several challenges, such as poor visibility into real-time traffic activity; there is no accurate way to know how many vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians are using specific intersections and crossings at any given moment. Existing sensors such as cameras and loop detectors have their limitations: they suffer from precision drift, perform poorly in bad weather, struggle to detect small or fast-moving objects, and lack sufficient resolution.
Adding to the difficulty, the urban environment itself is highly complex. Shadows, reflections, snow or ice, darkness, and overlapping flows like bikes sharing space with cars and pedestrians make many traditional sensor technologies unreliable. Another dimension is the compliance with GDPR and data privacy regulations.
Solution
To meet these demands, Forum Virium Helsinki wanted to evaluate how new 3D LiDAR sensors could add another layer of reliable data to make decisions upon. The LiDAR sensors provide high-precision detection and tracking in all light and weather conditions. According to the research in Flasheye’s white paper, LiDAR in infrastructure outperforms cameras under poor lighting or harsh weather and offers reliable real-time 3D spatial awareness.
For the implementation, the LiDAR system and sensor were placed at key locations, including busy intersections, pedestrian crossings, and major cycle paths. Flasheye’s perception software has platform-agnostic APIs so that data could seamlessly flow into other systems, and other city tools. Privacy was a key consideration: LiDAR data is used in a way that anonymises individuals, with no facial recognition or tracking of specific individuals, ensuring full GDPR compliance.
With the auto-labeled meta-data - activities, patterns, and events could be analyzed and reported as object counts, classifications such as cars, bikes, and pedestrians, as well as trajectories, speeds, queue lengths, and waiting times. The capability of AI enables detection identification of patterns, e.g. to detect emerging congestion or near-collisions. City planners can now access new insights based on reliable technology that are already used for advanced autonomy such as self-driving cars and robotics – both in real-time and optimization from historical data.
Results for the cities
The expected results from using ITS and new sensing technology;
Average waiting times at key intersections dropped by approximately 30–40% during rush hour, improving overall traffic efficiency.
Estimated CO₂ emissions in monitored zones were reduced by around 20%, thanks to less idling and smoother traffic flows.
Detection accuracy improved substantially, achieving over 95% accuracy in classifying vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians, even in low light or rainy conditions. The city also gained valuable insights into traffic peaks, bottlenecks, and usage patterns that had previously been poorly understood.
Safety was enhanced through better detection of near-miss situations and optimized signal timing, which reduced the risk of incidents involving pedestrians or cyclists.
Throughout the process, privacy was strictly maintained, with full GDPR compliance and anonymised tracking ensuring no personal data was collected.
Take-offs
Open and flexible technology was essential for the project, making it easy for organization to try out new technology in real applications. Flasheye’s modular perception software for 3D sensors allowed Forum Virium Helsinki to experiment, adjust thresholds, and integrate new components without having to rebuild the entire system.
Collaboration with Forum Virium Helsinki ensured that cities need urban planning and technical development closely aligned. The continuation of the project will result in testing new sensors from the market and new analytics on the data to enhance the safety and efficiency in the city.
Forum Virium Helsinki
Forum Virium Helsinki is Helsinki’s innovation company. They co-create urban futures with companies, universities, public sector organizations and Helsinki residents. Their mission is to make Helsinki the most functional smart city in the world, supporting projects in Smart City, Smart Mobility, Data & Digital Twins, Agile Pilots, Sustainability, and more.
