Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety

As America s aging roads fall further behind on much-needed repairs cities and states are turning to artificial intelligence to spot the worst hazards and decide which fixes should come first Hawaii personnel for example are giving away dashboard cameras as they try to reverse a latest spike in traffic fatalities The cameras will use AI to automate inspections of guardrails road signs and pavement markings instantly discerning between minor problems and emergencies that warrant sending a maintenance crew This is not something where it s looked at once a month and then they sit down and figure out where they re going to put their vans disclosed Richard Browning chief commercial officer at Nextbase which developed the dashcams and imagery platform for Hawaii After San Jose California started mounting cameras on street sweepers city staff approved the system correctly identified potholes of the time Now they re expanding the effort to parking enforcement vehicles Texas where there are more roadway lane miles than the next two states combined is less than a year into a massive AI plan that uses cameras as well as cellphone input from drivers who enroll to improve safety Other states use the instrument to inspect street signs or build annual reports about road congestion Every guardrail every day Hawaii drivers over the next limited weeks will be able to sign up for a free dashcam valued at under the Eyes on the Road campaign which was piloted on function vehicles in before being paused due to wildfires Roger Chen a University of Hawaii associate professor of engineering who is helping facilitate the undertaking announced the state faces unique challenges in maintaining its outdated roadway infrastructure Equipment has to be shipped to the island Chen announced There s a space constraint and a topography constraint they have to deal with so it s not an easy complication Although the project also monitors such things as street debris and faded paint on lane lines the companies behind the hardware particularly tout its ability to detect damaged guardrails They re analyzing all guardrails in their state every single day commented Mark Pittman CEO of Blyncsy which combines the dashboard feeds with mapping solution to analyze road conditions Hawaii transportation personnel are well aware of the risks that can stem from broken guardrails Last year the state reached a million settlement with the family of a driver who was killed in after slamming into a guardrail that had been damaged in a crash months earlier but never repaired In October Hawaii recorded its th traffic fatality of more than all of It s unclear how a multitude of of the deaths were related to road problems but Chen noted the grim trend underscores the timeliness of the dashboard effort Building a larger AI database San Jose has shared strong early success in identifying potholes and road debris just by mounting cameras on a inadequate street sweepers and parking enforcement vehicles But Mayor Matt Mahan a Democrat who founded two tech startups before entering politics explained the effort will be much more effective if cities contribute their images to a shared AI database The system can recognize a road complication that it has seen before even if it happened somewhere else Mahan commented It sees Oh that authentically is a cardboard box wedged between those two parked vehicles and that counts as debris on a roadway Mahan revealed We could wait five years for that to happen here or maybe we have it at our fingertips San Jose leaders helped establish the GovAI Coalition which went inhabitants in March for governments to share best practices and eventually figures Other local governments in California Minnesota Oregon Texas and Washington as well as the state of Colorado are members Specific solutions are simple Not all AI approaches to improving road safety require cameras Massachusetts-based Cambridge Mobile Telematics launched a system called StreetVision that uses cellphone details to identify risky driving behavior The company works with state transportation departments to pinpoint where specific road conditions are fueling those dangers Ryan McMahon the company s senior vice president of strategy corporate maturation was attending a conference in Washington D C when he noticed the StreetVision tool was showing a massive number of vehicles braking aggressively on a nearby road The reason a bush was obstructing a stop sign which drivers weren t seeing until the last second What we re looking at is the accumulation of events McMahon commented That brought me to an infrastructure concern and the key to the infrastructure issue was a pair of garden shears Texas representatives have been using StreetVision and various other AI tools to address safety concerns The approach was particularly helpful in recent days when they scanned lane miles to identify old street signs long overdue for replacement If something was installed or years ago and the work order was on paper God help you trying to find that in the digits somewhere noted Jim Markham who deals with crash information for the Texas Department of Transportation Having AI that can go through and screen for that is a force multiplier that basically allows us to look wider and further much faster than we could just driving stuff around Autonomous vehicles are next Experts in AI-based road safety techniques say what s being done now is largely just a stepping stone for a time when a large proportion of vehicles on the road will be driverless Pittman the Blyncsy CEO who has worked on the Hawaii dashcam operation predicts that within eight years almost every new bicycle with or without a driver will come with a camera How do we see our roadways in the present day from the perspective of grandma in a Buick but also Elon and his Tesla Pittman commented This is really crucial nuance for departments of transportation and city agencies They re now building infrastructure for humans and automated drivers alike and they need to start bridging that divide