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Smart Streets Soon Will Know You're Walking On Them

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The pedestrian: no longer indetectable (Photo credit: Pascal Maramis)

Cities are using microradar to count bicyclists, and they may soon be detecting pedestrians, too, as America's transportation agencies follow a public migration away from the automobile and toward alternate modes of transporation.

"We want to be able to measure bikes, pedestrians, transit users, everybody. We're no longer just going to measure cars," said Chicago Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein at the Complete Streets Symposium in Chicago Thursday.

More than 38 percent of Chicagoans travel in something other than a personal car, Klein said, typically a bus, train, bicycle or on foot. The city plans to increase that number to 50 percent by 2030 by making streets friendlier to alternative modes.

But as people get out of their cars, they abandon the metrics that transportation agencies have typically used to measure street use, leaving agencies looking for ways to count bicycles and pedestrians.

In Chicago, the city with the largest number of red-light cameras (almost 400), more street surveillance is on its way. The city plans to begin enforcing speed limits with automated cameras on about 5 percent of its streets, Klein said.

"People should feel like there might a camera right on every corner. And some people might say well gosh that sounds like a police state. But we have too many kids in particular and people from all walks of life who are hit by cars. We've got to change that."

Automated speed-limit control will slow cars, making streets safer for pedestrians, he argued, noting that fatalities have declined 60 percent at intersections equipped with red-light cameras.

The data collected on all modes of transportation will be put to real-time use "in the cloud," Klein said, to ensure safety, connectivity, and access for every user of the public way.

"We are prioritizing pedestrians first as the indicator species of a healthy, safe, and let's face it, a fun city," Klein said.

Speakers on a traffic-signal technology panel elaborated on uses for pedestrian detection data.

"We've heard about detection technologies that enable to us to detect bikes, and we're looking at buses and pedestrians. We have the detection technologies that allow us to model pedestrians, vehicles, bikers, and transit in an integrated way," said Stephen Smith of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute.

"Right now the core of our approach is an intersection scheduling technique that minimizes human delays in the intersection."

And robotic delays, according to Mike Shea of the Econolite Group, which manufactures traffic-signal controllers:

"We're talking about using some of these bike detection and pedestrian detection technologies so that if there's truly nobody out there why let the controller keep timing these walk extensions when there's nobody out there?," Shea said.

"There are things that are out there right now to allow you to do that."

Pedestrian-detection technology has already been deployed by car manufacturers, including Volvo and Daimler.

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