Bellevue Needs Your Help To Prevent Traffic Deaths And Injuries

BELLEVUE, WA - Tens of thousands of people, including drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists, die each year in traffic-related crashes - 40,000 die in car crashes alone, the equivalent of about five 737 planes crashing each week. Scores more are injured in crashes, seriously or otherwise. If there was a way to prevent all those accidents, injuries, and deaths, would you help out?

The city of Bellevue (and a number of other cities across the U.S.) is partnering with Microsoft and the University of Washington on an ambitious project called Video Analytics Towards Vision Zero to train traffic cameras to spot when, where, and why crashes happen. Using video analytics data, cities can begin to fix problems that contribute to or cause crashes.

For example, if a camera records several of the same type of accident occurring at a certain intersection, traffic engineers can step in and make improvements.

Bellevue has begun to implement the technology already, and traffic cameras around the city are able to detect and count motor vehicles with 95 percent or better accuracy. But the project also needs to train the cameras to spot pedestrians and bicyclists and other street-users. That can be hard for a computer due variability in size and shape of humans.

That's where you come in.

The project has set up a website to use real humans to crowd-source the work of teaching computers to spot objects like pedestrians or bikes. Teaching a computer to recognize a human or bicyclist is actually easy and only takes a few minutes. Here's how you can help:

1. Visit the Video Analytics Towards Vision Zero website
2. Watch a quick training video
3. Click the "participate today" button to start teaching

You'll be helping not only Bellevue but cities across the country participating in the project - those include Seattle, Snohomish County, Redmond, and even New York City and Los Angeles.

"We as jurisdictions will be able to start leveraging that data to identify high risk locations," Bellevue Transportation Principal Planner Franz Loewenherz said.

Image via City of Bellevue