It’s time to put the vision into Vision Zero.

The city could reduce long project timelines for safe street infrastructure if transportation planners adopted the latest technology for traffic analysis, rather than relying on antiquated methods, a new City Hall report claims.

The Department of Transportation still uses analog methods like manual clickers and pneumatic tubes for its months-long traffic studies, which could speed up to just a few hours if the agency modernized its ways, according to a recent Cornell Tech write-up.

The How NYC Moves study (PDF), was actually issued by Mayor Adams’ office, even though he claims the DOT — an agency controlled by Hizzoner — should modernize. For example, the report argues that the agency should create a centralized citywide traffic database similar to those of private companies such as Reply or Street light. And the city would need to access tens of thousands of street-facing cameras, along with information from vehicles equipped with sensorsand anonymized mobile phone GPS data.

Currently, the agency sends staff to each project to install temporary cameras, take measurements by hand and place sensors on roads to count vehicles.

Technological improvements like that “would pretty clearly require something that takes four months — data collection — just on one search,” said Paul Salama, one of the report’s authors and a fellow in urban technology at Cornell Tech. “It would really be a powerful reframing of how the process is done.”

Shortening study timelines for projects like bus and bike lanes and housing developments leaves opponents less time to derail them, Salama added.

“You have any delays of any kind that leave openings for things not to get done,” he said.

There are other costs to slow processes. Transportation studies are a key element of the city’s environmental assessments, which take place for major developments such as new housing, and the studies can add 9 percent to a project’s budget, according to the Citizens’ Budget Commission, and advocates have called on City Hall to listen to his own. advice.

“DOT uses some pretty antiquated systems for data collection, which adds time and money to that phase of a project, but the technology has gotten a lot better,” said Talya Schwartz, Senior Urban Mobility Strategist at Open Plans (which shares a company- mom with Streetsblog “The city can absolutely update their guidelines and procedures to be more efficient, which will lead to faster implementation while still being confident that the data is accurate.”

There is a network of tens of thousands of cameras operated by the DOT and other agencies such as the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, along with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The MTA, for example, installed cameras at 110 locations to prepare for congestion pricing — and even though Gov. Hochul has blocked implementation, the machines are constantly counting traffic entering the central business district.

The city could use artificial intelligence programs known as computer vision to extract information, not just traffic counts but traffic patterns, from these video feeds, Salama said.

“There’s this base of 10,000-20,000 cameras between agencies,” he said. “For legitimate and less-than-legitimate reasons, they’re not applying these technologies, computer vision, to count those cameras, because the structural barriers feel too high.

“Me, as an outsider, coming from an academic lens, it’s kind of ridiculous,” he added.

At a January symposium that preceded the report, DOT traffic planning and engineering representatives were skeptical about relying too heavily on these newer modalities. Agency officials argued that those methods had not been tested and that the data was not as reliable and did not sufficiently distinguish between New York City’s complex array of traffic on surface roads, freeways, bike lanes and elevated subway lines.

The big data sets had some problems, bureaucrats said, such as aggregating the data into hourly periods rather than the 15-minute increments the DOT uses to identify peak times. The computer programs sometimes produced “inconsistent results” and struggled to differentiate between traffic on a surface street and an adjacent elevated road, according to the report.

But those arguments shouldn’t stop the city from trying newer methods, Rachel Weinberger, director of Research Strategy at the Regional Plan Association, said at the confab earlier this year.

“New data collection opportunities are unproven, but old ones have been shown to be weak,” Weinberger said, according to the report.

There are also potential legal risks in trying new methods, Weinberger told Streetsblog. For example, if someone sued over a redesign that wasn’t based on tried and tested planning, a judge could take the DOT to task.

“‘Oh, you used an unproven technique,’ so, bang, you’re responsible,” Weinberger said. “A lot of times these things get blocked because the legal system is so crazy conservative.”

A forward-thinking agency leader with a supportive mayor could start implementing these changes while supporting them with the old ways, Weinberger added, citing as an example the combination of former DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“You might do both for a period of time,” Weinberger said. “Every once in a while there is a DOT commissioner who is willing to take a chance (with) a mayor who supports them.”

DOT spokesman Vin Barone said the agency supports the report’s recommendations, but argued the study was more to “discuss” the new technology than to “immediately” implement it.

“DOT supports the report’s recommendations, and we have used or explored many of these tools to collect data more quickly and efficiently,” Barone said in a statement.

The agency has been using anonymized connected vehicle and cellphone data “for years” for larger projects, but that the technology has “some limitations” discussed in the report, Barone added. There were also the officials pilot sensors for car, pedestrian and bicycle traffic in a dozen locations that could inform future street redesigns, the representative said.