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A Low Cost Approach to Improving Pedestrian Safety with Deep Learning
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoReally cool product. Though I wonder if it might result in actually less infrastructure dedicated to bikes. If you look at the charts, there are more cars in a 5 minute period than pedestrians or bicycles all weekend.
- jeffbee 4y agoYou build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago>You build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge. These sorts of statements are analogous to the median vs mean slight of hand (aka lying) that people routinely employ to intentionally mislead. At the very best it's "not the whole truth". To just build stuff and have it be used to a useful degree you need latent demand for transportation of all forms. These assumptions are generally questionably optimistic or untrue outside of urban areas (like real ones, not the census definition). A bike lane to a strip mall off the highway that has nothing else immediately around it does nobody any good. Slap up a bus stop. Even if the bus service is crappy it will still benefit somebody.
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- jeffbee 4y agoFirst of all if you are going to say that my remark is "analogous" to a lie, and that I "intentionally" mislead people in the course of bicycle infrastructure advocacy, then my reply is that you are analogous to a guy who needs to intentionally fuck off. Where the hell do you get off saying something like that about me? Secondly, there is a massive latent demand for cycling infrastructure in highly populated places that are suitable for cycling. That there are other places unsuitable for cycling is irrelevant. Another thing we often say on this topic is there are no transportation solutions to land use problems. But in America even when the development pattern is reasonable the infrastructure for cycling still doesn't exist. The dangerous, unpleasant, and inconvenient scattered bike lanes that we have in most American cities are acceptable to < 1% of potential cyclists, which is why the bicycle mode share in most American cities is << 1%.
- dang 4y agoYou broke the site guidelines badly here. I realized you were provoked, but users need to follow the rules regardless of what other commenters are doing. I'm not going to ban you right now because, after skimming through your recent history, it looks to me like you've been making a good-faith effort to stick to the rules, which I appreciate. But if you keep resorting to aggressive/abusive posting, we're eventually going to have to. We've cut you a ton of slack over the years, but it's not infinite! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34537078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34537078 (Jan 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914274 (Dec 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 (Oct 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 (April 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 (March 2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 (Dec 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 (Oct 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 (Sept 2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170477 (May 2020)
- bluefirebrand 4y agoThis is short sighted though, and the Golden Gate Bridge analogy, while cute, is flawed. You build a bridge to enable people to travel somewhere they want to go but currently cannot. When you're building a bike lane you're trying to get people to switch from driving a car to cycling. Driving is more convenient for most people. It's faster, it's easier, it's safer, and they are already used to it. Simply plopping in a bike lane is not, ever, going to convince the majority to start cycling. All it will accomplish is pissing most of them off because a road lane that used to be a useful piece of public infrastructure for them is now a bike lane dedicated to some small fraction of people who cycle, and it negatively impacts their commutes and therefore their lives.
- adrianN 4y agoNobody wants to convince the majority of anything. Most cities would be happy to raise the share of bikes by a few percentage points.
- digging 4y agoDoesn't take deep learning to realize that car infrastructure is never going to be cheap or safe compared to prioritizing mass transit and density.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- btilly 4y agoAs H. L. Mencken said, "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." A full bus is indeed far more efficient than a car. But buses run pretty empty most of the time. As https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenhouse/ https://reason.org/commentary/does-bus-transit-reduce-greenh... estimates, in 2009 buses emitted nearly double the CO2/passenger mile as cars! Prioritizing buses, meaning adding more, makes that figure even worse. And therefore as simple as the bus logic looks, it doesn't actually work out to better in the real world, in most American cities. There are ways to fix that particular problem. But the place to really start is in housing permitting, NOT the streets. When you get sufficient density of housing in one place and work in another, then mass transit becomes efficient. But people involved in traffic planning seldom have the authority to overcome NIMBY obstacles to building denser housing. And so they have to operate under constraints that make additional mass transit a generally worse option.
- ericmay 4y agoNot sure why you are focusing on busses here, they're just one option. Also we can do housing and transit improvements at the same time. I'll note I'm also not sure that "people involved in traffic planning" would be expected to have authority over housing, though maybe they should, provided that they have a mandate to not consider automobile traffic in any of their planning.
- byyll 4y agoIf (in theory) buses are shit, slow, dangerous, stuck in traffic, not punctual, don't expect people to use them regardless of density.
- jeffbee 4y agoThis is a fine example of citizen data science. I am curious why the vision stuff needs to run online. Would it be just as useful to collect the images for a week and run the analysis offline? Seems to solve some of the energy and frame rate issues.
- giantg2 4y agoI think some camera software like ZoneMinder and Frigate (?) have offline recognition software. I believe it's tailored toward faces but I might be possible to adapt it to vehicles and pedestrians.
- ausbah 4y agocool project but again one of those areas where dozens of pretty easily actions already exist. force cars to be smaller, add in roundabouts, tax car usage in high density urban areas, single lane one ways roads, etc.
- alexlesuper 4y agoNot sure "forcing cars to be smaller" is an easy action
- giantg2 4y agoLikewise for roundabouts. They're putting in new ones in some areas. In other areas, there simply isn't the room based on existing buildings, etc. Not to mention the cost aspect. It might help, but it's not "easy".
- WorkLobster 4y agoAre you thinking just of roundabouts that include a raised middle and/or central reservations on approaching roads? In general, roundabouts need no more space and cost than a regular road would, see e.g. https://goo.gl/maps/Y6jzLq5SuYzMMf2a6 https://goo.gl/maps/Y6jzLq5SuYzMMf2a6
- b3morales 4y agoGP was most likely thinking not of large roundabouts that take the place of major intersections, but the smaller traffic-calming type where the center can be as minimal as a 3 foot wide concrete block. They can be fit into pretty much any intersection because their purpose is not to change the path so much as to, frankly, eat up whatever extra space is available, which forces cars to slow around them.
- giantg2 4y agoYeah, I'm thinking about the 4 lane urban roads (or 2 lane one-way).
- 4y ago
- giantg2 4y agoThis gathers data, but doesn't exactly improve pedestrian safety. Something has to be done using that data for that to happen. Very cool though and should save tax payers money with this cheap solution.
- photochemsyn 4y agoA lot of people won't ride bicycles in the city because they feel unsafe, so any data collected on existing bicycle traffic patterns misses this dynamic. If you create physically protected bike lanes separate from car and pedestrian traffic that interconnect the major activity zones of a city, you'll get more bicycle traffic on those routes. Figuring out where the major activity zones are is something that this kind of data could help with, however.
- TheCoelacanth 4y agoYes, this is basically the "decide where to build the bridge by counting how many people swim across" approach.
- Davetron 4y agoReally cool project, I frequently see those pneumatic lines used here in Ireland. Presumably you could mostly eliminate the hardware cost by re-using video feeds from existing traffic monitoring cameras? Obviously doesn't apply to roads without cameras already in place.
- Tiktaalik 4y agoAn upside of this approach over the counting strips is a possibility for less vandalism. As remarkable as it sounds, people are so anti-bike in my city there were instances of people literally cutting the strips put on bike lanes to count use.
- stonogo 4y agoNot only does this not do anything to improve pedestrian safety, the datasets generated are not even validated? I struggle to understand who this benefits.
- resoluteteeth 4y agoThe title is perhaps not ideal, but it seems like municipalities do need to collect this information and use it for projects to improve pedestrian safety, so using machine learning to make this type of sensor cheaper and easier to install seems useful.
- ck2 4y agoIf you want to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe all you have to do is make it illegal to be on the phone in any form while driving a car or truck. No talking, no browsing, no sms, do not touch the damn phone while moving. Make that law, enforce that law with real penalties and tada, you've immediately solved 90% of safety problems. Dedicated, protected, bicycle lanes would be a real plus but either cities just don't want to be bothered or people just drive in the bicycle lane while they talk/browse on the phone.
- sockbot 4y agoIt already is illegal, and people keep doing it. Trying to make addictive behaviour stop by making it illegal doesn't work for drugs and it doesn't work for using phones while driving.
- peterstjohn 4y agoFun project, with a bit of a kicker as I see the words "Colerain Avenue" and realize it was literally across the road from me.
- j7ake 4y agoThis is amazing. I would love to see more of these projects.
- crmd 4y agoVery cool technology project, but this all seems like a lot of work and infrastructure attention for a vanishingly small constituency- 113 bikes in this analysis versus over 14000 cars.