When Transformers Learn the Map: Why Geography Still Matters in Traffic AI
Traffic control rooms rarely suffer from a shortage of numbers. Sensors count vehicles, lanes report flows, APIs stream updates, dashboards glow politely, and somewhere in the middle of all this a manager is expected to decide whether the next congestion wave is routine, dangerous, or about to become a public complaint. The naive answer is predictable: feed everything into a larger model. If one road sensor helps, fourteen must help more. If a Transformer can learn temporal patterns, give it the whole motorway and let attention perform its usual magic trick. ...