Verizon has devised a system of
cameras, sensors, and algorithms that can track the number of times cars
fail to yield to bicyclists and pedestrians at a particular
intersection.
Every city has at least one dangerous intersection where cars,
trucks, and buses jostle for space with pedestrians and bicyclists,
often resulting in injury, and sometimes death. Could a network of
wirelessly connected cameras and sensors, combined with sophisticated algorithms that analyze how people are behaving on the road, make these junctions less hazardous?
Verizon is using Boston as a test bed to find out. In March, the
tech giant began collecting car, bike, and pedestrian traffic data at
one of the city’s most hectic intersections. Boston will use the
information to redesign its streets, says Vineet Gupta, director of
policy and planning for the Boston Transportation Department. The data
can measure if interventions such as changing traffic signal timings or
installing a bike lane have been effective, he adds.
Boston’s ultimate aim is to eliminate traffic fatalities citywide by
2030. If the project is successful, other cities could adopt similar
“smart streets” technologies.
Verizon placed these signs around the intersection to notify people of Boston’s smart-streets project.
The data is being collected at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue, a
four-lane road, and Beacon Street, a three-lane, one-way street. The
intersection is located near a major bridge that links Boston
to Cambridge. Sixteen pedestrians and bicyclists were seriously injured
at this crossroads during 2015 and 2016, and one bicyclist was killed
after colliding with a flatbed truck.
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Like other cities, Boston typically collects traffic data manually and bases
its traffic-management designs on industry standards rather than local
information. To obtain more-accurate data, Verizon outfitted the
intersection with 50 cameras and sensors, including “quad cameras”—each
containing four smaller cameras that can pan, tilt, and zoom
in different directions—and infrared cameras that can do thermal
imaging, which is useful for discerning traffic activity in snow and
rain. Below ground, Verizon installed dozens of magnetometer sensors
that detect the velocity, number, and size of passing cars, trucks, and
buses by registering a change in frequency when large metal objects move over them. Since most bikes don’t have enough conductive material to trigger the magnetometers, the site also has radars for sensing bicyclists.
Verizon correlates this sensor data with two other types of
information: bus-location data provided by the city and software that
can tell whether a traffic light is red, yellow, or green at a given
time. The company’s algorithms parse these streams of information and
look for “trigger” interactions, such as video footage of a car nearing
a bike lane. Verizon then maps those data points to information from
other sensors and determines whether it qualifies as one of the 12
complex traffic “events” the company is tracking for Boston. Most of
these events relate to vehicles encroaching on crosswalks and bike
lanes, failing to yield to pedestrians, and double parking. Verizon
also counts the number of cars and bikes that run red lights, but the
city has pledged not to use the information to issue tickets or enforce
traffic laws. Verizon says it erases its video data after seven days
and does not keep any records linked to individual people or vehicles.
The western part of the intersection experiences the most
traffic incidents, according to Verizon’s data. A bicyclist was killed
there in 2015.
The precision of the data enables the city to see which traffic incidents are of most concern in specific parts of the intersection on a day-to-day basis. For example, early results show that cars consistently fail to yield to pedestrians on the western side of the intersection, which is also the area where the bicyclist was killed in 2015.
The city says it plans to extend the smart-streets program to
another half dozen intersections along Massachusetts Avenue so it can
begin to understand how the road functions as a traffic corridor
throughout downtown Boston. It may also add sensors that measure air
quality to monitor and eventually reduce pollution.
What technologies would you like your community to add to make your streets safer?
Tell us in the comments.
Will other municipalities follow? Boston’s commitment to reduce
traffic fatalities is part of the Vision Zero movement, which originated
in Sweden in 1997 and has been adopted by more than 25 U.S. cities,
among them Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and
Washington, D.C. Lani Ingram, vice president of Verizon’s Smart
Communities division, says she hopes to sell similar systems to those
cities. Verizon is currently trialing other smart-city technologies—such
as light poles that can broadcast emergency announcements, and
Wi-Fi-powered sidewalk kiosks that host information about local events—in Minneapolis; New Rochelle, New York; Sacramento, California; and Seattle.
