{"id":137119,"date":"2025-11-16T00:07:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T00:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/137119\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T00:07:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T00:07:08","slug":"ai-powered-cameras-mounted-on-cars-and-street-sweepers-are-spotting-road-hazards-and-deciding-what-to-fix-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/137119\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and street sweepers are spotting road hazards and deciding what to fix first"},"content":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0America\u2019s aging roads<\/a>\u00a0fall further behind on much-needed\u00a0repairs,<\/a>\u00a0cities and states are turning to artificial intelligence to spot the worst hazards and decide which fixes should come first.<\/p>\n

Hawaii officials, for example, are giving away 1,000 dashboard cameras as they try to reverse a recent spike in\u00a0traffic fatalities<\/a>. The cameras will use AI to automate inspections of\u00a0guardrails<\/a>, road signs and pavement markings, instantly discerning between minor problems and emergencies that warrant sending a maintenance crew.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not something where it\u2019s looked at once a month and then they sit down and figure out where they\u2019re going to put their vans,\u201d said Richard Browning, chief commercial officer at Nextbase, which developed the dashcams and imagery platform for Hawaii.<\/p>\n

After San Jose, California, started mounting cameras on street sweepers, city staff confirmed the system correctly identified potholes 97% of the time. Now they\u2019re expanding the effort to parking enforcement vehicles.<\/p>\n

Texas, where there are more roadway lane miles than the next two states combined, is less than a year into a massive AI plan that uses cameras as well as cellphone data from drivers who enroll to improve safety.<\/p>\n

Other states use the technology to inspect street signs or build annual reports about road congestion.<\/p>\n

Every guardrail, every day<\/p>\n

Hawaii drivers<\/a>\u00a0over the next few weeks will be able to sign up for a free dashcam valued at $499 under the \u201cEyes on the Road\u201d campaign, which was piloted on service vehicles in 2021 before being paused due to wildfires.<\/p>\n

Roger Chen, a University of Hawaii associate professor of engineering who is helping facilitate the program, said the state faces unique challenges in maintaining its outdated roadway infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cEquipment has to be shipped to the island,\u201d Chen said. \u201cThere\u2019s a space constraint and a topography constraint they have to deal with, so it\u2019s not an easy problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the program also monitors such things as street debris and faded paint on lane lines, the companies behind the technology particularly tout its ability to detect damaged guardrails.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re analyzing all guardrails in their state, every single day,\u201d said Mark Pittman, CEO of Blyncsy, which combines the dashboard feeds with mapping software to analyze road conditions.<\/p>\n

Hawaii transportation officials are well aware of the risks that can stem from broken guardrails. Last year, the state reached a $3.9 million settlement with the family of a driver who was killed in 2020 after slamming into a guardrail that had been damaged in a crash 18 months earlier but never repaired.<\/p>\n

In October, Hawaii recorded its 106th traffic fatality of 2025 \u2014 more than all of 2024. It\u2019s unclear how many of the deaths were related to road problems, but Chen said the grim trend underscores the timeliness of the dashboard program.<\/p>\n

Building a larger AI database<\/p>\n

San Jose has reported strong early success in identifying potholes and road debris just by mounting cameras on a few street sweepers and parking enforcement vehicles.<\/p>\n

But Mayor\u00a0Matt Mahan,<\/a>\u00a0a Democrat who founded two tech startups before entering politics, said the effort will be much more effective if cities contribute their images to a shared AI database. The system can recognize a road problem that it has seen before \u2014 even if it happened somewhere else, Mahan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sees, \u2018Oh, that actually is a cardboard box wedged between those two parked vehicles, and that counts as debris on a roadway,\u2019\u201d Mahan said. \u201cWe could wait five years for that to happen here, or maybe we have it at our fingertips.\u201d<\/p>\n

San Jose officials helped establish the GovAI Coalition, which went public in March 2024 for governments to share best practices and eventually data. Other local governments in California, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas and Washington, as well as the state of Colorado, are members.<\/p>\n

Some solutions are simple<\/p>\n

Not all AI approaches to improving road safety require cameras.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts-based\u00a0Cambridge Mobile Telematics<\/a>\u00a0launched a system called StreetVision that uses cellphone data to identify risky driving behavior. The company works with state transportation departments to pinpoint where specific road conditions are fueling those dangers.<\/p>\n

Ryan McMahon, the company\u2019s senior vice president of strategy & corporate development, was attending a conference in Washington, D.C., when he noticed the StreetVision software was showing a massive number of vehicles braking aggressively on a nearby road.<\/p>\n

The reason: a bush was obstructing a stop sign, which drivers weren\u2019t seeing until the last second.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re looking at is the accumulation of events,\u201d McMahon said. \u201cThat brought me to an infrastructure problem, and the solution to the infrastructure problem was a pair of garden shears.\u201d<\/p>\n

Texas officials have been using StreetVision and various other AI tools to address safety concerns. The approach was particularly helpful recently when they scanned 250,000 lane miles (402,000 kilometers) to identify old street signs long overdue for replacement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf something was installed 10 or 15 years ago and the work order was on paper, God help you trying to find that in the digits somewhere,\u201d said Jim Markham, who deals with crash data for the Texas Department of Transportation. \u201cHaving AI that can go through and screen for that is a force multiplier that basically allows us to look wider and further much faster than we could just driving stuff around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Autonomous vehicles are next<\/p>\n

Experts in AI-based road safety techniques say what\u2019s being done now is largely just a stepping stone for a time when a large proportion of vehicles on the road will be\u00a0driverless.<\/a><\/p>\n

Pittman, the Blyncsy CEO who has worked on the Hawaii dashcam program, predicts that within eight years almost every new vehicle \u2014 with or without a driver \u2014 will come with a camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do we see our roadways today from the perspective of grandma in a Buick but also\u00a0Elon and his Tesla<\/a>?\u201d Pittman said. \u201cThis is really important nuance for departments of transportation and city agencies. They\u2019re now building infrastructure for humans and automated drivers alike, and they need to start bridging that divide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As\u00a0America\u2019s aging roads\u00a0fall further behind on much-needed\u00a0repairs,\u00a0cities and states are turning to artificial intelligence to spot the worst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,47027,93568,111,139,69,145,3946],"class_list":{"0":"post-137119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-autos","12":"tag-car-safety","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-traffic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}