pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

“We were asking ‘how can we get out ahead of these?’” says Bellevue senior transportation planner Franz Loewenherz acknowledging our country’s reactionary mentality to transportation safety. That is why the City has recently teamed up with researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington (Dr. Yinhai Wang and PacTrans), and engineers from Toole Design Group in Seattle to design a program that will allow them to use traffic cameras that are already in place to identify potentially dangerous situations.

This project is in conjunction with the city’s pedestrian and bicycle safety initiative that launched in 2009, and the “Mayors’ Challenge for Safer People and Safer Streets,” a yearlong campaign led by the U.S. Department of Transportation that aims to reduce traffic-related injuries and death.

“If we nail it, this is huge,” said Victor Bahl, director of Microsoft Research’s Mobility and Networking Research. “Once we get the basic problems solved and get everybody excited, we open up the floodgates” to tackling more safety and infrastructure problems and “creating a next-generation traffic management system.”

The goal would be for a program to be able to distinguish between pedestrians, bicyclists, vehicles, etc. and identify when incidents occur and when near incidents occur (i.e. when a vehicle needed to come to a rapid stop almost hitting a bicyclist). This then would enable the city to make smart infrastructure decisions before serious accident and injury occurs.

The University of Washington and PacTrans role will be to first define what a near incident is and then develop the technical modelling so that the program can decipher between different modes and between different situations (i.e. incident, near incident, or none).