The Division of Transportation is rolling out new technologies to track how people today move about the street, whether or not in a car or truck, on foot, or on two wheels — a important upgrade from the time-consuming manual perform to log website traffic that the agency does now, which slows down life-saving upgrades.

The DOT has placed sensors at 12 places across the city as element of a pilot plan with the tech enterprise Viva to much better analyze street styles and applications, find out exactly where security projects perform very best, and much better comprehend how people today are employing public space.

“This street activity sensor technologies will let us to make our streets safer much more speedily,” Mayor Adams mentioned in a statement. “This technologies has the possible to save time, cash, and lives. We will be monitoring its effectiveness closely and deploying it strategically to comprehend how we can very best maximize its effect.”

According to preliminary information collected in March from a single sensor at 34th Avenue and 77th Street — the heart of the gold common of open streets, now referred to as Paseo Park — people today on foot start off flocking to the region as quickly as the barricades get set up at about 7 am. The quantity of pedestrians almost hits 400 people today by about two p.m., and 300 about just just before six p.m. Cyclists steadily use the street all through the day, with almost 200 riding the blocks at about five p.m., according to the information, which was initially published by Curbed.

A visual of who is employing the 34th Avenue open street and when. Graphic: NYC DOT

The sensors will be capable to count and determine up to nine distinct modes of travel, like pedestrians, bicyclists and e-scooters, analyze travel patterns and how they alter seasonally, measure how rapid every single mode of transportation is traveling, and detect close to-crashes.

The new technologies will be piloted in just about every borough but Staten Island.

• In Brooklyn, it’ll be at Schermerhorn and Smith streets, Flushing and Vanderbilt avenues, Berry and N. Sixth streets, and Hoyt and Warren streets.
• In the Bronx, there will be a single sensor positioned at Willis Avenue and East 135th Street.
• In Manhattan, the sensors will be positioned at Central Park West Drive and Columbus Circle, Initial Avenue and E. 59th Street, Sixth Avenue and W. 23rd Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
• And in Queens, they will be stationed at 34th Avenue and 77th Street, Broadway and Vietor Avenue, and 11th Street and 44th Drive.

The DOT says the sensors will be purposely placed in locations with higher concentrations of micro mobility customers, bikers, and pedestrians in order to give essential, actual time analytics necessary for street redesigns — eliminating the require for a staffer to manually count the cars more than hours, a time-consuming and inefficient approach, according to a spokesperson for the agency.

And on Berry and N. Sixth streets, a sensor spits out a colorful evaluation of the roadway’s website traffic patterns — highlighting just how lots of much more pedestrians than vehicles traverse the roadway, and exactly where and how cyclists move about.

Modes of transit visualized from a sensor on Berry Street. Graphic: NYC DOT

The sensors could also support resolve misallocations of public space, exactly where vehicles normally get the bulk of area regardless of becoming outnumbered by pedestrians or cyclists.

On Lexington Avenue, for instance, the city plans to take a lane away from vehicles to expand the sidewalk right after a manual DOT evaluation revealed that vehicles, which get 3 vehicular travel lanes, comprise just 17 % of its usage, and that pedestrians, who get just a single-third of the public space obtainable, make up 76 % of the roadway’s customers. At some points all through the day, pedestrians even outnumber drivers much more than 4 to a single, according to DOT.

And on the common Initial Avenue bike lane, a car count performed in 2021 revealed that vehicles and trucks barely outnumbered bikes, regardless of drivers finding practically 12 instances as a lot space on the uptown roadway. 1 of the sensors will be placed at Initial Avenue and E. 59th Street.

These numbers followed a related pattern on Second Avenue, exactly where a count revealed that there had been 323 vehicles and trucks and 171 bikes, or 1.9 vehicles and trucks for just about every bike, regardless of bikes possessing just eight feet of space on the wide road, compared to one hundred feet for the movement and storage of vehicles.

But advocates are skeptical that it’ll make a distinction. The city lacks enforcement and political gutsiness, not information. Case in point, bike lanes blocked by vehicles with placards on them.

“Additional information and facts is usually superior, but it will not clear the court officers out of the Lafayette Street bike lane. Our yawning gap is in leadership and management, not technologies and information,” mentioned Bike New York’s Jon Orcutt.