Member Article

Streets Systems brings experience home

Newcastle based Streets Systems have developed a new AI software application to monitor physical distancing and pedestrian comfort as part of their traffic survey business.

The firm usually operates all over the UK working on Walking and Cycling Design projects.

Director Tom Bailey said “our work involves traveling hundreds of miles to work in locations where there is a very specific demand for data on pedestrian movement or the way cyclists use traffic junctions.

In the run up to the pandemic we were working in London on one of the Cycleway Routes and in Manchester looking at a corridor across the city centre.

This is an unusual time for us as we’re suddenly seeing a huge interest in physical distancing and the level of service for pedestrians in towns and cities in the North East“.

Newcastle have announced plans for transforming city centre and residential streets including a revamp of historic Grey Street. Other North East councils are working on similar projects after being offered funding and guidance from The Department for Transport.

Research undertaken by Nexus has revealed that 77% of the public across Tyne & Wear now support permanent changes to make town and city centres traffic free.

“Our experience of quick interventions to change streets is that there are always unexpected results over and above what designers are looking to see. To keep public support councils will need to show that there is some science behind what they are doing and react quickly to correct and improve schemes.” Bailey said.

Use of cameras to collect traffic and footfall data has been the norm for many years. However in the last 24 months advances in artificial intelligence have seen a number of firms across Europe and North America start to switch to software based analytics.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Bailey .