BOSTON (WHDH) – Boston city officials this week announced a new partnership with Google aimed at using AI to tackle traffic congestion on local streets. 

Dubbed Project Green Light, the program puts AI to work to model traffic patterns and recommend traffic signal timing adjustments. 

In a statement Thursday, officials said they started working with Google on Project Green Light in February and have, so far, made changes at four intersections in the Fenway-Kenmore, Mission Hill, and Jamaica Plain areas. 

“We know that even small tweaks can go a long way with traffic,” Mayor Michelle Wu told 7NEWS. 

Traffic analytics firm INRIX in 2023 ranked Boston as the eighth worst city in the world for traffic delays. 

“One of the most frustrating parts of living in a major city is traffic, so Boston is taking every step to combat congestion and get people to where they need to go,” Wu said. 

Google product manager Matheus Vervloet said Project Green Light pairs AI with Google Maps technology to analyze intersections and create recommendations for municipal traffic engineers. 

In Boston, officials said they examined hundreds of intersections and noted a 50% drop in stop-and-go traffic after heeding Project Green Light recommendations at the intersections of Huntington Avenue and Opera Place, and Amory Street and Green Street.

Project Green Light is currently operating in 14 cities across the world. Boston and Seattle were the only US cities invited to join for free.

Moving forward, Boston officials said city engineers are considering implementing additional recommendations from Project Green Light later this year. 

“This is one piece of something that we know could be a bigger part of the solution,” Wu said. 

“We’ve seen great potential to reduce unnecessary stops and reduce emissions and pollution,” Vervloet said.

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More whales visited Boston Harbor this week, with the breaching animals sometimes even visible from land.

Since a sighting on Monday in Dorchester Bay, another whale was seen between Deer Island and Long Island Bridge Wednesday afternoon. NBC News photographer Mark Garfinkel shared an image of the whale’s dorsal fin among dozens of fishing boats.

Garfinkel wrote that the fishermen were after some striped bass, but most took a break to see the whale peak over the water.

Nicole Ridge, of Nantucket, shared images with Boston.com of a breaching whale she saw in the harbor Thursday morning. She was fishing in Boston Harbor with her father, a charter captain, when she was able to capture the whale leaping out of the water.

“Something we both found remarkable today was the attentiveness of not only the Environmental Police but also the Boston police boat to keep a perimeter around the whales to keep them safe,” Ridge said in a email. “All of the other boats fishing in the area were equally respectful.”

The whale put on the show in front of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Eagle, which is set to meet the USS Constitution near Castle Island on Friday. 

Garfinkel captured more images from Deer Island Thursday for the news station, showing the whale with two Massachusetts Environmental Police boats.

Multiple Harbor whale sightings this week

Thursday’s appearances make four sightings just this week, which experts say could be concerning for the whales. Last week, a 2-year-old humpback whale surprised whale watching tours in the harbor. A naturalist with the tours said the whale could have been in distress or just chasing down prey.

Linnea Mayfield, the naturalist manager with Boston Harbor City Cruises, said last week that seeing a whale in the Harbor isn’t rare, but it’s not very common. The humpback then was closer in the Inner Harbor near the Conley Terminal.

“This does occur every few years,” Mayfield said. “We don’t see it quite that far in the harbor often.”

Mayfield warned boaters to give the whale a wide berth, which appeared to be happening in Ridge’s pictures. 

“It does make all of us who work in the whale watching world quite nervous,” Mayfield said last week, “because it does put whales at heightened risk of vessel strike and other threats.”

I love a good media fight. Primarily when it doesn’t involve me.

Via Sports Business Daily, an interesting tussle emerged on Wednesday between long-time Patriots reporters Mike Reiss of ESPN.com and Mike Felger of WBZ-FM.

It happened when Felger suggested Reiss was pushing a “team-friendly” report on a possible trade of 49ers receiver Brandon Aiyuk to the Patriots. Said Felger: ““To me, I smell a rat with the reporting on the money. . . . He’s incredibly well-sourced within the Patriots. So I know where it’s coming from, and I know how [the Patriots] operate.”

That prompted Reiss — one of the genuinely nicest people in the entire industry — to call the show. He said on the air, “The insinuation that bothers me is that you think, Mike, that this information is coming from the team.”

Felger said that’s exactly what he thinks.

“You can feel that way,” Reiss said. “But the fact that you think I would go on SportsCenter, on that platform, and say that based on something from the team. . . . you’re creating a perception with listeners that that’s the way this works. That’s incredibly dangerous.”

Before I say anything further, I need to say this. Unequivocally. Mike Reiss is a great reporter. And he’s a great person.

But certain basic facts in this business are undeniable. When one reporter covers one team and that reporter reports on something involving that team, of course the information has come from, or has been corroborated by, the team. It would be stupid for a reporter to publish a report regarding the team the reporter covers without running it by a team source, even if only to say, “Tell me if I’m wrong.”

Reiss wouldn’t have been doing his job properly if he didn’t check with a team source. And, in situations like this, the information came from one of two sources: the team or the player’s agent.

Even if Reiss got it from Aiyuk’s agent, Reiss wouldn’t have used it without checking with the team. If he hadn’t, and if the team had taken issue with his reporting, he would have had to do damage control with the one and only team he covers.

In my opinion, this is ultimately about Felger committing what many in the media regard as a cardinal sin — speculating on reporters’ sources.

I’m in the distinct minority on this, but I think it’s fair game for people who know how the sausage is made to try to guess where the pork came from. It’s part of the process of helping the audience understand what’s really going on. Usually, reporters don’t publicly fight source-guessing when it happens.

By calling Felger’s show, Reiss made the issue into a thing that made its way into Sports Business Daily. And who knows? Maybe Reiss did it because he got a call from his Patriots source asking him to do it.

I’m kidding about the last part. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it actually happened that way.