Ford Launches Safety Insights to Help Cities Reduce Car Crashes
By Brett Wheatley, Director, Mobility Businesses, Autonomous Vehicles LLC & Mobility Partnerships, Ford Motor Company
Reducing traffic accidents is a huge priority for cities across the nation. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 54, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and well over 33,000 fatal accidents have occurred annually since 2016.
At Ford, we are committed to working with cities to help make our streets safe. That’s why we are officially launching an innovative new tool to aid cities– one that uses connected vehicle data and artificial intelligence to help them build smart, safe transportation systems.
Safety Insights is a newly available web-based software tool for transportation planners and engineers from Ford that provides a detailed overview of road safety in cities. Using Safety Insights — which synchronizes crash data from multiple sources and combines it with Ford’s own connected vehicle data — city planners can identify streets and intersections that could be improved to increase safety. A few examples of what it enables include the ability to:
· Access multiple powerful data sources. Safety Insights combines crash data, connected vehicle data, and safety countermeasures research. Planners can even analyze travel patterns based on information gathered from multiple sources, like smart phones and navigation devices in connected vehicles, trucks and IoT devices.
· A comprehensive view of safety. Safety Insights helps planners identify crash hotspots and prioritize countermeasures. They can even dive deeper to analyze areas of roads that experience more harsh braking, excessive acceleration events, traction control issues, near misses and more.
· Evaluate solutions and determine impact. Transportation engineers can input cost-to-implement data in Safety Insights to help scenario plan cost savings and understand crash reduction and time of return predictions. When paired with StreetLight InSight®, they can even run before-and-after studies to analyze changes in travel behavior.
Safety Insights is another way Ford is helping cities get the most out of connected vehicle data and better prepare their infrastructure for a safe, connected and autonomous future.
Ford recently teamed up with Freethink to highlight the potential of Safety Insights and showcase how it works. Freethink is a platform dedicated to covering the biggest ideas and most groundbreaking technology, so the development of Safety Insights marked a great opportunity to show how Ford is ushering in the future of mobility.
Ford and Freethink are working on a series of videos related to the company’s work in Mobility, the first of which is now available. Click here to watch it and learn more about Safety Insights.
Ford Launches Safety Insights to Help Cities Reduce Car Accidents was originally published in City of Tomorrow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.