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Tired of being told there’s no hard evidence of areas with traffic troubles, a city councillor is using volunteers and video to document dangers on our streets.
Jeff Leiper of Kitchisippi ward has filmed one intersection so far: Island Park Drive and Byron Avenue, where his group has found a recurring problem of cars running red lights or climbing the curb to push through the intersection.
Just a start, Leiper says in a blog: “This is a proof-of-concept. If it works, I’ll be filming more intersections, and filming the same intersections multiple times.”
“I’m intrigued by the potential,” he said in an interview. “You can go to the city and make a qualitative argument to say people don’t feel safe” at a given spot. “But without quantitative evidence … I think it can be tough to move the city.”
It is already working, according to Kevin O’Donnell, a programmer (and political activist) who lives near this intersection and provided the software for the project.
On Nov. 13, Leiper shot 45 minutes of video at Byron and Island Park. O’Donnell wrote software to help analyze it.
“I (saw) three cars in a row mounting the curb” to go around cars in the intersection, said O’Donnell. From there, they continue off course through a crosswalk.
He said city staff “are up against a wall” without hard evidence. “But now we have direct evidence. Within 45 minutes we have 10 people mounting the curb. Now Jeff can walk that over to staff and say, ‘Look!’
“And all it really takes is a steel post with a reflective thing on it (in the intersection), and the problem is solved.”
Leiper calls it crowd-sourcing. It’s also known as “citizen science,” which means mobilizing huge numbers to gather observations. Annual counts of birds are done this way.
O’Donnell says this one intersection may not be the worst, but with video the curb-mounting problem “became obvious right away.”
He wrote the code at no charge after hearing of Leiper’s video — “it just jumped to the top of my curiosity pile” — and says any cell phone can record the video, so there’s no expense.
He divides a long video into short pieces so that volunteers can watch and annotate a few minutes at a time. As a check, two volunteers scan each segment separately.
His added software also counts how long a light has been red to give context if a car or bicycle goes through on the red.
“I think (the video) illustrates just how much BS we put up with on the roads because it’s just normal. And it needs to be made not-normal any more.”
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Jeff Leiper of Kitchisippi ward has filmed one intersection so far: Island Park Drive and Byron Avenue, where his group has found a recurring problem of cars running red lights or climbing the curb to push through the intersection.
Just a start, Leiper says in a blog: “This is a proof-of-concept. If it works, I’ll be filming more intersections, and filming the same intersections multiple times.”
“I’m intrigued by the potential,” he said in an interview. “You can go to the city and make a qualitative argument to say people don’t feel safe” at a given spot. “But without quantitative evidence … I think it can be tough to move the city.”
It is already working, according to Kevin O’Donnell, a programmer (and political activist) who lives near this intersection and provided the software for the project.
On Nov. 13, Leiper shot 45 minutes of video at Byron and Island Park. O’Donnell wrote software to help analyze it.
“I (saw) three cars in a row mounting the curb” to go around cars in the intersection, said O’Donnell. From there, they continue off course through a crosswalk.
He said city staff “are up against a wall” without hard evidence. “But now we have direct evidence. Within 45 minutes we have 10 people mounting the curb. Now Jeff can walk that over to staff and say, ‘Look!’
“And all it really takes is a steel post with a reflective thing on it (in the intersection), and the problem is solved.”
Leiper calls it crowd-sourcing. It’s also known as “citizen science,” which means mobilizing huge numbers to gather observations. Annual counts of birds are done this way.
O’Donnell says this one intersection may not be the worst, but with video the curb-mounting problem “became obvious right away.”
He wrote the code at no charge after hearing of Leiper’s video — “it just jumped to the top of my curiosity pile” — and says any cell phone can record the video, so there’s no expense.
He divides a long video into short pieces so that volunteers can watch and annotate a few minutes at a time. As a check, two volunteers scan each segment separately.
His added software also counts how long a light has been red to give context if a car or bicycle goes through on the red.
“I think (the video) illustrates just how much BS we put up with on the roads because it’s just normal. And it needs to be made not-normal any more.”
tspears@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
