Boston is notorious for bumper to bumper traffic, leaving Beantown drivers fed up. Boston has the fourth worst traffic in the country. Drivers here can spend, on average, nearly 90 hours a year, almost four days stuck behind the wheel. The national average is more than 50 hours. Nobody likes being stuck in traffic. So the city of Boston is teaming up with Google to try to make sure their drivers hit more green lights. It's called probably Project Greenlight, which in part uses artificial intelligence to monitor traffic patterns and then come up with solutions to improve traffic flow. Matthias Voevlouet is a product manager with Google.

You know that great feeling when you hit two or three green lights in a row? That's what we're trying to create with green light.

We went to one of the intersections project greenlight analyzed. What is AI actually doing to these lights?

We're basically shifting a couple of seconds from one of the lights to the other one. Right? And this prevents traffic from backing up.

It may not seem like much, but a few seconds can mean the difference between getting a red light or getting green lights all the way.

We're trying to create so called green waves.

Yasha Franklin Hodge is Boston's chief of streets. He showed us the city's traffic control room.

Yeah, so this is the traffic management center.

Here, engineers monitor the city's roads. Project Greenlight makes suggestions to improve traffic flow, and the engineers then can implement those changes. Yasha says this will be a game changer.

We think Project Greenlight can be an important part of reducing delay in Boston.

But it's not just here in Boston. Project Greenlight is already live in Seattle and in twelve other cities around the world, improving efficiency and cutting down time at stoplights. This saves time for drivers and has an added benefit for air quality.

We see the potential for a reduction of up to 30% of the number of stops and 10% in emissions at.

Affected intersections, hoping to put the project in the fast lane, making a positive impact on the environment and frustrated drivers. Stephen Roma, NBC News, Boston.

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