There is a plethora of new ways to get smarter about how people move through places, and it could usher in a golden age of planning for cities and transportation.
For finding out what’s hot in the world of “people tracking,” Walk Hack Night at Mobility Lab on Thursday was the place to be.
Co-sponsored by WalkArlington, the event featured a handful of innovators speaking to a standing-room-only crowd of about 80 members of the Transportation Techies group in rapid-fire presentations on why knowing more about the movements of society is an important puzzle piece in better city planning and transportation.
“We need solid data so that cities can adapt,” said Stanislav Parfenov, an engineer by training but now “solutions architect” for Placemeter in New York. “Very few places assess their placemaking projects. It’s now as easy as placing a smartphone with sensors on the inside of a window and counting the movement outside of people, bikes, cars, cats, anything really.”
Parfenov’s firm measures traffic flow and urban design for clients ranging from planners to businesses to hackers, and he noted that it importantly never records facial recognition or identifies people in any way.
From left: Presenters Stephanie Nguyen, James Graham, and Jonathan Rogers, and Mobility Lab’s Howard Jennings
James Graham and Jonathan Rogers from the Washington D.C. Department of Transportation showed how their agency is putting this kind of technology to work for their city. As part of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Vision Zero transportation plan, which seeks a goal of zero traffic deaths or serious injuries in the city by 2024, the duo is examining safety improvements for people who bike and walk.
D.C. has good data on the locations for the worst spots for car crashes, but “the bicyclist and pedestrian perspectives are minimized. The data won’t tell you perceptions people have of the intersections they wouldn’t cross,” said Graham, adding that crashes and other incidents appear lower in those kinds of places but, in fact, need significant redesigns so people could actually cross the street in those spots.
So far, 4,000 data points around the city have been added by citizens as part of Vision Zero’s crowdsourcing map. DDOT is also holding public-awareness events and gathering surveys about how people – including young people with fresh ideas – would redesign areas.
The concept of Vision Zero started in Sweden and now 10 other U.S. cities besides D.C. have started programs, Rogers said.
Another part of this whole “counting-people” craze is that anyone who closely observes their surroundings will start to notice pedestrian sensors placed in nondescript places.
There is one branded “Kaiser Permanente blue” in front of the health organization’s building in the NOMa neighborhood of D.C. Ted Eytan, a family physician with Kaiser, noted that 25 percent of people who buy wearables to track their fitness abandon them within six months. And that was from a study of workers from Rock Health, which was the company that gathered the data!
“We put the pedestrian counter in front of Kaiser to help figure out street use. What’s going on outside has a beat and a rhythm,” Eytan said. “As a city, we have to think about entire populations and health.”
Arlington, Virginia – just across the Potomac River to the south of D.C. – is also thinking along these lines. It collects biking and walking data in many places and shares it with the public upon requests.
Fraser McLaughlin
“Pedestrian sensors can be attached to posts anywhere. They can be attached and re-attached easily,” said Fraser McLaughlin, who works in tech support at Eco-Counter in Canada, which helps manage Arlington’s monitors. “The infrared cameras can tell whether it’s a bicyclist or a pedestrian.”
He noted that Eco-Counter has massive servers to hold all the data being collected by its 8,000 counting systems in 40 countries. Because some of the company’s clients have not come around to the idea of open data, Eco-Counter can’t make its entire dataset public, but McLaughlin said it’s not for want of hoping that could someday become the standard.
Among the other Transportation Techies’ presentations:
- Stephanie Nguyen discussed Landmark’s beta app, which allows pedestrians to find their ways by identifying landmarks. She said, through studies conducted by the company, that people remember 60 percent of the landmarks on their routes and that routes are completed 28 percent faster when pedestrians follow photos rather than the blue GPS dots found on typical wayfaring apps.
Christopher Fricke of GeoMetri
Christopher Fricke of GeoMetri presented an “indoor navigation app,” which entities like businesses and airports are using to determine how many people are visiting and how they are moving around in the space. “You know how Waze gives you information about an accident a couple of miles away that you want to avoid? We want to do that for indoor spaces,” he said.
- Kotaro Haro is building a dataset to determine just how usable sidewalks in Baltimore are for people in wheelchairs. He does this by using a combination of actual volunteers and computers.
Photo by M.V. Jantzen. For more, please go here.