What did we launch?

SFT (StreetSafety) is an online platform where you can know the safety conditions of street interactions and design together to improve it!

With transportation planners and street designers being the target user groups, SFT could be applied at public meetings, workshops, and charrettes. By integrating data visualization and interactive design, SFT facilitates the consensus building process and empowers the public to know better about the street conditions and try their own to make design improvements.

The following is a sample target persona: Sara, a DOT transportation planner. Sara has been committed to the work of Vision Zero since she joined DOT two years ago. Her major tasks include cleaning street-related data, holding safety workshops, and collaborating with designers for street improvement schemes. Playing an advocative as well as the communicative role, Sara regards it as her responsibility to raise public awareness on street safety. However, she has also encountered challenges. It is difficult to integrate and make insights from multiple data sources, and she lacks more visual tools to convey the picture of safety street features to the public.

Why is it important?

According to the fatality analysis reporting system of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the traffic fatality rate in NYC is 3.3, which is a quarter of the country’s average. However, in terms of the absolute number, New York City ranks the second-highest in the country.

2018 New York City Traffic Accidents

Street safety has been an emphasized vision by the de Blasio administration. The mayor has launched the Vision Zero program in 2014, aiming to eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries on NYC streets by 2024. It is believed that traffic deaths and injuries are not accidents but crashes that can be prevented. Approaches proposed by Vision Zero include left-turn traffic calming, bus boarding island, speed cushions, roundabouts, pedestrian island, raised crosswalk, turning signal safety treatment, and proactive warrant analysis.

NYC Vision Zero

Raising public awareness of street safety conditions is among the top priorities. For one thing, it is challenging to dig and convey insights from multiple sources of street-related datasets. Moreover, participatory tools are in need to form better understandings on how street amenities could work to enhance safety conditions.

What are the features of SFT?

To address the needs, the MVP of the SFT product contains three features:

Data visualization: for now, we have three sets of data. The pedestrian volume count at the intersection scale, the vehicle volume count at the intersection scale, and the annual on-street injuries and accidents for pedestrians and motorists respectively. These datasets will be grouped by user types and be presented with interactive maps and statistics.

Location Selection: Besides displaying the data, decisions are made on selecting locations to adopt safety improvement schemes. Intersections with higher traffic/ pedestrian volume as well as higher accident rates are in more urgent need of upgrading and retrofit.

Interactive Design: There is a saying that a picture is more than a thousand words. And a model with more than a thousand pictures. How do the curbs or street islands affect the perception of the street? Which amenity to select and apply to a certain location? The interactive design feature provides you with 6 amenity options that you can try on yourself to fit them to the street intersection.

While Streetmix.net is one of the pilots in interactive street design, it mostly focuses on lane width from a section view. Considering that most accidents happen and many of the street amenities apply at the intersection scale, our product will focus on the street sections. Both plan view and perspective view will be provided in the interactive design feature.

How do you use it?

On a public workshop, Sara is helping Sam, an NYC citizen, to use SFT.

Sam wants to get a whole picture of the latest street safety conditions of NYC, especially for the pedestrians. He is also curious to see how the safety facilities, as mentioned in the Vision Zero program, could change the streetscape.

After selecting pedestrian as the user group and 2018 as the year, Sara leads Sam to go through the two data layers.

By ticking on both data layers, Sam is surprised to see that SFT not only overlaps the two maps, but also does a data integration and creates a ranking of intersections. Clicking on the ranking buttons, Sam gets to know more details about the intersections with most urgent need to enhance street safety.

Sam is eager to try on the design tool! He clicks on the green button to See Design Options. He enters into a new interface showing the plan view and the perspective view of the selected street, and the amenity icons at the bottom. Sara shows Sam that by tapping on the icon, a model of the amenity will be auto-applied to the plan view. By clicking on the refresh button, the amenity model will be presented in the perspective view as well. The view could also orbit around to see how the amenity fits the street.

Sam soon gets familiar with the tool. He tries on grouping several amenities together to see how they change the streetscape. He is very inspired as he has never imagined that the street could be retrofit in such ways.

What is next?

The MVP is the very first step to address the need. Future improvements could first take place to refine the current features, then to add on more features.

Short-term: Current feature improvement:

• more sources of data integration (such as the data on cyclists)

• more sophisticated methods for location selection

• more flexibility in design options (more choices on amenity colors, styles, sizes, etc.)

Long-term: Add in more features:

• including regulation and law

• including models of future forecast

• enlarging the scope from intersections to the road system