Emergency vehicles like ambulance and fire brigades getting stuck in the traffic often results in casualties. Many approaches have been proposed for the problem that includes use of RFID tags, computer vision, manual override of traffic signals, etc. These approaches have disadvantages in terms of number of components, complexity, price, range, etc. In this paper, we propose a new architecture CSTMC which stands for "cloud-based smart traffic monitoring and controlling" and two approaches on top of CSTMC, namely next light green (NLG) and all lights green (ALG), respectively. CSTMC addresses the limitations faced by the previous methods by using cloud computing and IoT cluster. This helps the system to be much simpler and reliable and reduce potential points of failure. Our NLG approach allowed us to achieve an improvement of 15% in the travel time of emergency vehicles based on the simulations performed.