Israeli AI computer vision company Nexar will provide US transit agencies, cities and departments of transportation access to its CityStream service free for three months.

CityStream works by detecting, monitoring and mapping all roadwork zones across the country. All images are then accurately located for context and time and finally sent to city officials.

US government plans to rebuild infrastructure and reshape the economy – including fixing 32,000km of roads and 10,000 bridges across the country – are expected to create a sharp increase in new work zones causing traffic congestion and safety challenges.

As infrastructure restoration picks up speed, the CityStream licence could help cities, DoTs and agencies automatically know how many work zones there are at any given time. These data will help preserve the roads’ vehicle capacity and coordinate activities to eliminate the danger of open trenches, the close proximity of pedestrians to roadways, or immovable objects on the road.

This is even more important as reports show an increase in deaths per kilometre travelled during the first half of 2020, even as the country was on lockdown due to Covid-19.

Nexar collects data every month from 200 million kilometres and has a dataset of 3.2 trillion images. Because roadworks are generally unreported to mapping services, Nexar is extending its hand to the transportation industry.

The platform automatically detects barricade elements in work zones using AI and imagery from its dashcam network, remotely monitors the state of all work zones in real time, knows when and where work is happening, and enforces the safety of pedestrians, workers and drivers.

“As a result of Covid-19, traffic patterns have become even more dynamic, which means valuable time is wasted optimising safety and moderating traffic congestion in work zones,” said Eran Shir, Nexar’s CEO. “Nexar enables cities to go back in time and check work zone setups on-demand instead of being supported by old data or out-of-date plans, thus ensuring that cities and DoTs are addressing today’s transportation patterns. Using Nexar’s data to address this issue means benefiting workers on the road, governmental decision makers and the community itself.”

Nexar turns cars into vision sensors. Its platform powers car vision connected services and apps, at scale, making vision-based applications for better driving, powered by a crowd-sourced vision feed. Using anonymous, aggregated data captured from this network, Nexar has developed a portfolio of vision-based data services for public and private sector partners to make roadways safer and more efficient. The platform is already deployed across hundreds of thousands of cars, detecting parking spots, managing city safety and more.