The New York City Department of Transportation has expanded its traffic monitoring sensor partnership with Viva in an attempt to better learn how New Yorkers move around the city.
After first piloting the program in 2023 with 20 monitored locations, NYCDOT will install more of these small, privacy-protective smart traffic monitoring Viva sensors at 80 locations throughout the five boroughs to county pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and vehicles to identify patterns for street usage. Locations will vary from busy commercial streets to residential neighborhoods to capture diverse data.
In addition to identifying different types of pedestrians and vehicles, Viva’s sensors can measure speed and capture turning movements to inform future infrastructure changes, such as installing a mid-block crosswalk where pedestrians are routinely crossing the street between existing crosswalks.
These new sensors will replace traditional manual traffic counts where they are installed to deliver real-time data collection, reducing reliance on short-term, labor-intensive counting programs. Viva’s sensors process and immediately discard footage as it is gathered in order to only retain anonymous data, including obscuring faces and license plates.
By deepening the city’s relationship with Viva, NYCDOT hopes to accomplish the following:
- Evaluate the effectiveness of street redesigns and safety projects
- Identify high-risk locations before crashes occur using “near-miss” data
- Better allocate street space among pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles
- Improve access to transit, loading zones, and local businesses
- Build a dataset that measures how pedestrian and cycling volumes change across the city and over time.
Viva’s sensors use artificial intelligence for data gathering and can currently identify vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooters, motorcycles, and buses. Viva is currently training the program to identify other transportation including taxis, cargo bikes, wheelchairs, and joggers.
