Bellevue has a new ally in the battle to reduce pedestrian fatalities to zero: big data. The city, along with Seattle and several others, are piloting new a program that uses machine learning to proactively improve bike and pedestrian safety. The hope is that the machines, trained by a crowdsourced group of humans to recognize bikes and people, can figure out where crashes are likely to occur.
Today, planners often wait for a crash to occur before attempting to make it safer. For example, the Rainier Ave road safety project started after it became clear that the road had an above-normal accident rate. To achieve the Vision Zero goal will require looking not just at intersections with high collision rates, but also places where near-collisions occur frequently.
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