On the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) between Brant Street and Trafalgar Road, the Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) has installed between 20 and 30 side-fire radar traffic sensors for monitoring vehicle speeds, flow, and occupancy as of January 2026. This stretch of freeway is less than 20 km long, and with thousands of kilometres of major highway infrastructure across the province, these systems, along with road weather information systems (RWIS), cost well into the millions.

With much of their use focused on supporting long-term transportation planning decisions and providing data to dynamic messaging signs (DMS), these systems are rarely used to their full potential. More can be done to ensure drivers, especially commercial and emergency vehicle operators, are better informed in the context of incident prevention .

Dynamic-Link Risk Intelligence (DLRI) is an algorithm that integrates traffic, weather, infrastructure, and vehicle data to better understand how collision risk changes across highway corridors. While existing sensor-fusion research largely focuses on improving the accuracy of individual sensor readings, less attention is given to how sensor spacing, placement, and network density affect the quality of those results.

By combining these measurements with vehicle characteristics such as axle count and mass, DLRI seeks to develop a centralized framework for evaluating roadway risk and supporting applications such as dynamic safe-speed intervals, risk mapping, route planning, and decisions regarding where additional sensing infrastructure may provide the greatest value.

dynamic-link risk intelligence