Fast Track to the Future: What will smart cities look like?

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In this era of technological breakthroughs, engineers and researchers are trying to make world cities better, safer and smarter. Our correspondent Ge Yunfei recently went to several cities across China and the U.S. He presents some experts' visions of the future.

According to the World Health Organization, traffic accidents claim the lives of more than 260-thousand Chinese every year. But in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, authorities are trying to reduce that number with the help of these CCTV cameras. Xu Jitao drives to work from his suburban home every day.

XU JITAO WHITE COLLAR WORKER IN HANGZHOU "We're all very cautious on the road nowadays. Many cameras are connected to an artificial intelligence system. Any bad driving will be recorded immediately and reported. So the traffic order in Hangzhou is much better than before."

There are hundreds of traffic lights and video surveillance cameras across the city. But how can experts make them smart enough to recognize or even forecast anomalies on the road? Chinese tech giant Alibaba has spent the last two years working with traffic police on a cloud computing system called City Brain.

HUA XIANSHENG VICE PRESIDENT OF ALIBABA "To use the current AI technology, and computation power to mine and extract values of data in the city. This is the main idea of the City Brain."

With real-time video processing, City Brain can report possible car crashes, confirm accidents in 20 seconds and even automatically alter traffic lights to let ambulances drive through.

HUA XIANSHENG VICE PRESIDENT OF ALIBABA "Our technology can make the cameras automatically check what's going on on the street. Currently the accuracy of the system at least more than 95 percent of the detecting results are correct."

GE YUNFEI SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA "As Alibaba in Hangzhou is trying to keep the city's traffic in order, Facebook is speeding up its WI-FI connection in San Jose."

KIP HARKENSS DEPUTY CITY MANAGER, SAN JOSE "Facebook, for example, is a large partner with us, helping us look at some very high speed WiFi downtown."

Kip Harkenss is San Jose, California's Deputy City Manager. His city is now working with Facebook on this small white box called Terragraph. In dense urban areas, excessive consumption of high-resolution photos and video often slows data transmission. But Terragrah can bring high-speed connectivity to those areas. And it also has one more advantage.

KIP HARKENSS DEPUTY CITY MANAGER, SAN JOSE "Just for a few months, now we got them on 250 different poles. What it does is to replace the back-haul that you normally do with fiber. And it does through the air."

With a smarter traffic infrastructure and faster data transmission may come the next generation of urban transportation.

SEBASTIAN THRUN CEO OF KITTY HAWK "I think we just scratch the current form of transportation. One thing that is vastly under-explored is to go through the air."

China and the US have already made progress toward that goal. In February, a company named Ehang flew the world's first driverless passenger drone in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Four months later in Las Vegas, Thrun, the founder of Kitty Hawk and a former Google X chief flew the Flyer that opened public trials of flying cars with simple control sticks.

SEBASTIAN THRUN CEO OF KITTY HAWK "The air is very ample. It's generally very safe. It's almost got nothing to hit. And it's very efficient because it goes straight line."

From the smart city to flying cars, the future of city transportation may arrive sooner than we think. Ge Yunfei, CGTN from San Jose.