Portland Traffic Safety Sensor Project
Portland's Traffic Safety Sensor Project utilizes 200 street light-mounted sensors to detect traffic patterns & data, helping traffic engineers to improve street design.
Newsworthy
New traffic sensors in Portland will help engineers produce better street designs | KATU
PORTLAND, Ore. – The City of Portland celebrated the installation of 200 traffic safety sensors Monday.The sensors are designed to make some of the city’s most dangerous roads safer. It’s part of Smart City PDX and will help with Vision Zero – a campaign t
New traffic sensors in Portland will help engineers produce better street designs | KATU
TechRepublic on Flipboard
More than 200 safety sensors are being installed in Portland to improve traffic safety on city streets.
TechRepublic on Flipboard
Portland kicks off smart city initiative with traffic sensor safety project | ZDNet
If cities don't carefully plan smart city deployments, "the risk is technology happens to us rather than working for us," Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said.
Portland kicks off smart city initiative with traffic sensor safety project | ZDNet
Portland, OR launches street sensor safety project | Smart Cities Dive
Smart Cities
Portland, OR launches street sensor safety project | Smart Cities Dive
Highlights
Portland recognized the need to focus on traffic safety and street design for vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians.
The city invested $1 million to install 200 smart sensors along the most dangerous streets.
The sensors will vastly improve Portland's ability to gather traffic data and incorporate it into future street designs.
Summary
Pedestrian fatalities have climbed recently, with approximately 6,000 killed in interactions with vehicles across the United States in each 2016 and 2017. There are few places in the US where bike traffic, in particular, is more common than environmentally-focused Portland, Oregon. Mayor Ted Wheeler recently launched the $ Smart City PDX Traffic Safety Sensor Project$ , investing just over $1 million in installing 200 sensors on light poles along the city’s most dangerous streets.
This represents a significant partnership between key players in the smart city movement. The Current City IQ sensors themselves are made by GE, powered by Intel’s IoT technology, and networked via AT&T’s digital infrastructure. Representatives from all three corporations attended the official launch event, signifying their support of the initiative. The technological investment is a substantial upgrade from previous measurement mechanisms employed by Portland. Although the city boasts a robust database of information about pedestrians and cyclists, the data was previously gathered by deploying city employees and volunteers to designated city blocks to perform manual counts for two-hour periods.
Each unit includes two cameras, approximately 35 environmental sensors to measure factors such as temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity, a CPU/GPU that will perform real-time analytics, a solid-state hard drive for local data storage, and cellular hardware for data transmission. The data that is being collected was designed with privacy in mind: after the camera snaps an image, the image analysis software analyzes the desired information (e.g., number and speed of pedestrians, cyclists, and automobiles), and then the picture is deleted, preserving just the metadata. The sensors are designed with long-term customizability in mind and can be remotely reprogrammed to capture different data.
The data will be used by city traffic engineers and safety experts to redesign streets, improving both traffic flow and safety. This is a significant priority for Portland, which has the 7th-worst traffic in the nation despite being the 26th-largest city. Mayor Wheeler states that this project will serve as a model for other cities around the United States and that the lessons learned in the Traffic Safety Sensor Project can be used to mold future systems. The Current City IQ sensors have been deployed to various other cities, including San Diego.