The streets are watching.
New York City's Department of Transportation is expanding its use of high-tech sensors across city streets, Commissioner Mike Flynn announced this week.
The devices are meant to help the department gather more information about where pedestrians cross, where bikes need better access, and when trucks or cars travel through specific areas. The DOT already installed 20 sensors as part of a 2023 pilot. Now the agency plans to install the devices at 100 locations, though officials haven’t said where.
Previously, the DOT had to send inspectors to sit by the roadside, observe traffic and take notes of the number of vehicles. The new technology — a camera-like sensor installed on a signpost – can perform the same tedious work 24/7.
Eric Beaton, the DOT's deputy commissioner for transportation planning and management, said the innovation has helped the department better understand collisions and near-misses. The sensors can pick up near-misses that human inspectors may not catch, like when a car's door almost hits a cyclist.
“It's not easy to be able to write down vehicle types at the same time as the number of volumes, for example,” Beaton said. “These sensors provide a much richer set of data for us to work with.”
Beaton said the DOT was trying to address privacy concerns by training the technology to anonymize the faces and car plates before a human accesses the data.
“There's nothing that we ever touch or that anyone could ever touch that has anything identifying to any person or any vehicle,” he said.
Department officials said the new sensors will cost roughly $200,000 in city dollars, on top of $100,000 paid for the 2023 pilot. The rest of the cost is covered by grant funding, according to the agency.
During the 2023 pilot, inspectors performed parallel counts to see if the sensors' data corroborated the human counts and the results satisfied city officials.
Jon Orcutt, a transit advocate and former policy director for the DOT, said the city needs much more data on bike counts and pedestrians.
“There are 20 or 25 sites where bikes are counted,” he said. “You get a very small data set from that. You know we have 6,000 miles of streets.”
The DOT said it will be incorporating some of the information into its open data page but advocates said they want to see all of it.
“If they're collecting this data on behalf of the public, as a taxpayer-funded agency, we deserve to know what it says and so there should be regular reporting,” he said.
Some of the insights the city hopes to glean include whether mid-block crosswalks are needed, which bike lanes need more attention, and where high-speed buses may be implemented.
“Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, who was New York City's traffic commissioner in the 1980s and is now chair of transportation research at Hunter College, said when he worked as a consultant analyzing traffic patterns around nightclubs, it was difficult to observe conditions for more than one or two nights.
"But with machine vision, it can work day and night," Schwartz said. "You can see problems at any time, even when government workers are at home for Christmas or any other day of the year."
This story has been updated to reflect additional information from the DOT.
