A Smart Cities Connect article reviews how the City of San Jose, Calif., is testing our Intelligent Infrastructure Solution (IIS) to assess traffic conditions and identify proactive safety measures that can be taken to help save lives.

Our smart city solution is a full-stack system that provides traffic monitoring and analytics to improve road safety, efficiency and air quality, and help cities plan for smarter, safer transportation systems.

The article notes how San Jose will use IIS to “aid in identifying near-misses, a crucial data point in understanding the problems the city faces.” It quotes Clay Garner, San Jose Chief Innovation Officer, saying:

“In order to really understand how and why these crashes are happening, we need an ecosystem of different types of sensors at our most vulnerable intersections and corridors to capture near-misses of pedestrians. We know when a collision happens because there’s a police report and a medical report and that is a cataloged data point, but that is only a fraction of the close calls on our streets every day.”

The story states that San Jose is “is facing its worst year on record for pedestrian deaths.” It adds the “Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition has claimed that neighborhoods with large black populations have double the rate of pedestrian deaths, which is thought to be caused by receiving less public investment and traffic-calming measures than other areas of the city.”

Among the advantages of the Intelligent Infrastructure Solution is its ability to leverage as few as one unit per intersection which can help public infrastructure investments achieve scalability throughout a community. Also, the solution’s lidar sensors do not identify individuals’ facial characteristics, an important privacy factor for civic applications.

IIS combines our sensors with Bluecity’s powerful AI software, enabling users to monitor traffic networks to generate real-time data analytics and predictions.

The article quotes Mr. Garner saying:

“We can have millions of well-placed sensors throughout our cities, but without AI or [machine learning]-enabled systems to be able to use that information at scale, it’s not going to be so useful to us.”

The San Jose project demonstrates the opportunity our Intelligent Infrastructure Solution can provide in transforming infrastructure to make communities smarter and safer.