City officials in Redmond, Wash., believe participating in a project with General Motors and Kirkland-based Inrix will help them target future spending on traffic safety projects.
Redmond is one of 13 U.S. municipalities participating in a National League of Cities Capstone Challenge, which matches municipal governments with private-sector partners on projects ranging from virtual reality training for police to addressing homelessness.
GM, through its software-as-a-service platform GM Future Roads, will work with Redmond and the city of Easton, Penn., on road safety data using a tool called Safety View. The tool, co-developed with Inrix, analyzes traffic safety data to help local governments create better safety plans.
Until now, Redmond’s approach to tracking traffic safety has been based on reports from residents and analysis of local police department reports, said Mayor Angela Birney in an interview with GeekWire.
But complaints are subjective, and a phone call from a resident about people are driving “too fast” on their street doesn’t give city officials all the information they need.
“What does that really mean?” Birney said. “It’s really limited data.”
Over the next eight months, the new project will give the city access to anonymous data aggregated from cars operating with GM’s OnStar onboard system. GM has approximately 15 million connected vehicles in the U.S. and Canada.
OnStar captures data on hard braking and collisions, which can be analyzed in the Safety View tool to give city engineers better data on Redmond’s most problematic streets and intersections for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, the mayor said.
In turn, Redmond city staff will incorporate these findings as it works through its transportation master plan process. The plan covers all aspects of getting people and goods safely around the city, including cars, bicycles, pedestrians, freight trucks and parking.
Birney said it’s hard to get meaningful traffic data to help guide transportation planning. Information from the new project will be “extremely useful,” she said.
“We’re using good data to make those decisions,” she said. “We want to put in the best systems possible to keep people safe.”
The work kicked off in June. GM Future Roads, Redmond and Easton will present their findings next year at a National League of Cities conference. The “most innovative and impactful” project will receive an award from the league.
Getting picked by the National League of Cities for the project was a big boost for Redmond, Birney said. Redmond is getting the data analysis done for free as part of the challenge.
While Redmond is growing, and is on the cusp of moving from a suburb to urban center, it’s still relatively small and doesn’t have the resources to afford these kinds of projects on its own, the mayor said. “We feel really fortunate that we were selected for this.”
Inrix recently completed a study using SafetyView around 27 schools in Washington, D.C. The study looked at crash volumes, speed and demographic data, including the impact of specific School Zone safety signs on traffic and spending trends linked to income and geography.
The company says the Infrastructure Act passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in 2021 is providing “unprecedented” federal funding for these kinds of traffic safety projects nationwide.
