Overview
- The New York City Department of Transportation announced plans to scale a 2023 pilot from 20 sites to 100 sensor locations across the five boroughs to collect continuous street activity data.
- The camera‑like devices use machine vision to classify pedestrians, cyclists, buses, cars and trucks, map movement patterns, measure speeds, and flag near‑misses that human counters may miss.
- DOT says all footage is processed on the device with faces and license plates blurred and raw video deleted so only anonymized traffic outputs are retained.
- City officials budgeted roughly $200,000 in new city funds on top of $100,000 spent on the pilot and will rely on additional grant funding for the rest of the program costs.
- Advocates are pressing the DOT to publish fuller, regular reports of the anonymized outputs because the data is taxpayer funded, even though the agency says it will post some results to its open data portal.