By Scott Etkin

Last week, the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it has installed 12 sensors on lampposts across the city to track how pedestrians, vehicles, bikes, and other modes of transportation move and cross paths. The pilot program, expected to run through the end of the year, is intended to inform design changes that aim to make roads and intersections safer. 

Of the four sensors installed in Manhattan, one is located at the southwest end of Central Park, along the main road near Columbus Circle. On any given day, there is a steady stream of runners, walkers, cyclists, e-bikes, scooters, bike rickshaws, and horse-drawn carriages passing through the intersection. 

“The initial pilot intends to focus on areas with high bicycle, micromobility, and pedestrian traffic to really put this technology to the test – though we plan to expand locations and, to be clear, this does not inhibit DOT from making safety improvements in other parts of the City,” a DOT representative wrote to WSR. 

The sensors are contracted through VivaCity, a technology company based in London that has already installed more than 3,500 such devices in Europe. The equipment is discrete – a small white box affixed to a lamp post – and uses artificial intelligence to identify up to nine different modes of travel, including pedestrians, bicyclists and standing e-scooters. The sensors also measure speed of travel and detect “near-miss” events between road users. Only anonymous data is stored. 

This high-tech approach will replace manual traffic counts, which involve a staff member counting the different modes during a specific time frame. The current process is “costly and limited in duration, location, and types of data points collected,” according to the press release. 

DOT plans to publish the data on the City’s open data portal. If the pilot is deemed successful, the agency will scale up the use of the sensors citywide, and use the information to guide street redesign projects intended to improve traffic safety. Some potential remediation techniques include bike lanes, expanded pedestrian space and “turn calming” (obstacles that force vehicles to take wider, slower turns around corners). 

Pedestrian and cyclist safety has been a recurring topic of discussion at recent Community Board 7 (CB7) meetings. The board recently voted against a deliverista hub just south of the 72nd Street and Broadway subway station, in part due to concerns about how e-bikes would mix with pedestrians on the narrow traffic island. CB7 also voted in favor of a study on protected crosstown bike lanes. 

Cycling safety activists on the UWS have long called for more protected bike lanes, including in 2018 after a woman was killed while biking along Central Park West. In 2020, the protected bike lane going north along Central Park West from 59th Street to 77th Street, installed in 2019, was extended up to the end of the park at 110th Street. 

“One traffic fatality is too many,” said DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez in the announcement. The sensor pilot program is one way the agency is exploring ways “to prevent the next tragedy from happening.”