Microsoft Plans To Prevent Car Crashes Before There Occur

Microsoft and the city of Bellevue, Wash., have a futuristic plan to prevent cyclists and pedestrians from being hit by cars: analyze traffic patterns to predict when and where accidents are mostly likely to occur, and prevent them before they happen.


“This is like ‘Minority Report,’ ” Bellevue senior transportation planner Franz Loewenherz told GeekWire, referring to the 2002 sci-fi movie in which an elite police unit is able to peer into the future to see crimes that haven’t been committed yet. (In fairness, the movie takes a pretty dim view of arresting people based on such predictions, but doesn’t necessarily condemn the basic idea of trying to anticipate what events are going to happen.)
Rather than relying on gifted clairvoyants to look into the future, Microsoft plans to use video footage and predictive algorithms.
The technology would take video from Bellevue’s existing traffic cameras and run it through special software to determine what combinations of cars, bikes, and pedestrians are using a street or sidewalk at any moment in time. The software would automatically determine the direction of travel and rate of speed for each, then look for near misses in which a car almost hit a bicycle or a pedestrian.
By crunching all this data, the software would predict which intersections are most likely to see accidents in the future, and would suggest changes such as adjusting stoplight timing in order to lower the probability of a collision.