Three grants totaling over $17 million were issued to the Connecticut Transportation Institute for updates to crash reports and monitoring road safety with AI, according to the executive director.
The Connecticut Transportation Institute is a collaboration between the University of Connecticut’s College of Engineering and the Department of Transportation. Eric Jackson, the Connecticut Transportation Institute executive director, also founded a group within the CTI which manages a motor vehicle crash online repository.
Jackson established the Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center (CTSRC) in 2012, which manages the repository called the Connecticut Roadway Safety Management System.
The largest grant of $10.4 million will help develop the safety analysis tools, Jackson said. It was funded by the Federal Highway Administration and the Connecticut Department of Transportation.
The principal investigator for the grant, Kai Wang, is also using AI technology to track road safety and has already tested around three different intersections on UConn’s campus, Jackson said. He added that the AI cameras will look like little black boxes that track vehicle and pedestrian paths and are expected to be temporary.
“It’ll be an overhead view, so it’s not going to be people’s faces, there’s not privacy concerns,” Jackson said. “Basically, what [the AI is] looking for is instances where vehicles and people come in close proximity to each other.”
Jackson said CTI couldn’t use pre-existing intersection cameras because they’re part of the UConn Police Department’s protected feeds. He added that most students probably won’t notice a difference because of the cameras already installed on intersections on campus.
Connecticut towns are consistently asking the CTSRC for data on road safety statistics, Jackson said.
“I think I’ve had five towns contact me in the last two weeks to help them pull data for their town council meetings, specifically around automated speed enforcement,” Jackson said.
Another CTI grant of $6.7 million was funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and CT DOT to enhance the state’s crash reporting form for more detailed data on accidents involving new technology like e-bikes and autonomous vehicles.
“If a bike crash occurs, the officer may or may not write something in the narrative of the crash that they were on an e-bike… we’re kind of just hoping that it’s mentioned if it was an e-bike or not,” Jackson said. “We’re also potentially seeing a lot of e-bike crashes that result in fatalities, but since they did not involve a motor vehicle… we don’t have a way to capture those crashes.”
Safe Streets and Roads for All was the name of the third UConn-focused grant, which allocated $1.5 million for a list of tasks. One of the tasks involved exploring the use of cameras with automated speed enforcement at UConn.
“UConn would conduct a series of analysis to determine locations where speed and red-light cameras might have the most significant impact on [vulnerable road user] safety,” Jackson said.
He added that UConn would look at the analysis and result of West Hartford’s speed camera program to determine if the locations would be justified for a camera.
Another task for the UConn specific grant involved adaptive lighting technologies, which Jackson said adjusts illumination levels based on the needs of road users to reduce emergency consumption. The task would also maintain a higher level of service and visibility for vulnerable road users like pedestrians, Jackson said.