Road safety wizards

California's state transportation agency (CalTrans) has issued two contracts to pilot generative AI solutions for identifying dangerous locations in its road network and recommending potential solutions to enhance safety for vulnerable road users. This move comes in response to annual increases in the number of fatal and serious injury collisions in California, especially those involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists and highway workers. It's goal is to help CalTrans more effectively and efficiently make use of the volume of data produced on more than 50,000 miles of highway and freeway lanes including traffic sensors, cameras, third party data streams, photos, and incident reports. Vendors will deploy technology in a sandbox supervised by the state's technology agency to ensure compliance with California data governance, privacy, and cybersecurity rules.

As the use of generative AI to analyze large and diverse streams of mobility-related data becomes more widespread, city transportation agencies will be able to better understand where and why risks for vulnerable road users exist, and more rapidly identify interventions to enhance safety. More broadly, these tools and approaches can be translated to other planning and operations related to climate resilience.