[HN Gopher] AI predicts accident hot-spots from satellite imager...
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AI predicts accident hot-spots from satellite imagery and GPS data
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 157 points
Date : 2021-10-13 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unite.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unite.ai)
| toss1 wrote:
| What I want to know is if it predicts bicycle accident hotspots
| -- especially angled intersections where at ordinary speeds for
| both vehicles, the angles are such that a cyclist can stay hidden
| from the drivers' view behind their right "A" pillar until the
| last second when it is too late. Accidents there are just a
| matter of odds, as whenever the timing is right, even good
| drivers will likely not see the cyclist until too late.
| _nalply wrote:
| This happens in roundabouts where I live. The cyclist comes
| from the left in a curve and my car is also turning. With a
| specific timing and alignment of the movements the cyclist
| stays exactly behind the A pillar the whole time. Especially
| insidious is that by turning my car my view is sweeping over
| the roundabout but the cyclist still stays hidden.
|
| I learned to swing my upper body sideways to have a look behind
| the pillar. As a cyclist I learned to look for the face of the
| driver and to stop if I don't see the eyes.
|
| Because I both hit a cyclist and got hit as a cyclist by a car.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Now how about border hopper hot spots?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > satellite imagery of the area adds information about lane
| disposition, and the number of lanes, as well as the existence of
| a hard shoulder and the presence of pedestrians
|
| Hmmm....
|
| A bit like autonomous driving, sounds like the sort of thing that
| probably works beautifully well in places like the US and
| elsewhere with wide roads and predictable grid patterns.
|
| I imagine this sort of thing would mark large swathes of
| Europe,Africa, Japan, India and all sorts of other places as
| "accident hot-spots" though.
| lixtra wrote:
| > This is a step toward general AI, because our model can predict
| crash maps in uncharted territories."
|
| I hope they are misquoted here.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| The word "general" does indeed not appear in this sense in the
| paper.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| The fact that you can make out every single _historical_ crash
| location in their prediction shows that this model is horribly
| overfit. (Edit: The paper does mention this general problem.)
|
| Also, the rest of the prediction appears to just be the density
| of the road segmentation. Look at the parking lot (?) top left of
| the purple box (or all the road-rich neighborhoods in the right
| half):
|
| https://ml8ygptwlcsq.i.optimole.com/fMKjlhs-dkVIYmPS/w:700/h...
|
| Plenty high estimated risk, zero actual collisions.
|
| You could get the same predictive quality with a simple gaussian
| blur of the "historical accidents" plots (road segmentation
| included), it seems.
| notafraudster wrote:
| It's an interesting problem.
|
| If I am an accident oracle -- say I know with certainty where,
| say, 50% of accidents will occur (the other 50% are truly
| stochastic with no structural component at all) -- and the city
| believes me, then surely when I tell them an accident will occur
| at Intersection X, they will take measures that prevent accidents
| at Intersection X.
|
| But this also means any measure of my ability to predict
| accidents is confounded, because the equilibrium behaviour would
| be that I never predict an accident and plenty of other accidents
| occur. Moreover, because of all the other confounders, it's
| actually unclear whether we should expect accidents to go down or
| up or stay the same or what, and to the extent year to year
| variability was already quite high the problem will be even
| larger, so even high level numbers before and after hiring my
| services aren't easily interpretable.
|
| Which is fine, you just need to convince decision makers of this
| particular inferential fallacy and then hopefully they keep
| listening even though the KPI is wrong. Except what if the type
| of accidents change and I'm no longer an accident oracle? Then
| the mitigation efforts are wasted, and also the money they pay
| me.
|
| One solution would be to basically engage in some kind of RCT
| where some of my predictions are held out for assessing my model
| while others are acted on and where the strength of the prior
| about my effect decays. Good luck telling voters and lawyers that
| justification, though.
|
| Fun stuff.
| simion314 wrote:
| The real solution is not only to predict but to explain why the
| accidents happen, there are always some reasons why some
| places/location have more accidents then normal.
| theshadowknows wrote:
| Right? Say if you know there will be a 2% chance to have a 1%
| increase over the yearly average at LocationX on
| Thursday...what can you do? Add police and first responders?
| Reroute traffic? Tell people to stay home? I feel like nothing
| that can be done will be able to _solve_ the problem but just
| _move it somewhere else_
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| That's a bit defeatist.
|
| The Dutch took the approach of treating car crashes similarly
| to how the FAA treats plane crashes: do a deep analysis of
| what occurred, what the root structural issues were (for
| instance, is it difficult for a car turning left to see
| oncoming traffic?) and then change the environment to improve
| the structural issues.
|
| Knowing where incident hot spots are likely to be should help
| you redesign the areas most likely to cause issues.
|
| There's a reason the Netherlands has around 1/3 as many
| traffic fatalities per capita as the US: in the US, it seems
| like we throw up our hands at problems like road crashes,
| whereas with problems like plane safety we take an
| incremental and root-cause analysis approach to improve
| safety over time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If the city does something to reduce the risk of some of the
| pointed areas, does your oracle reclassify it as lower risk?
|
| If you make an oracle that simply points that some necessary
| geometries accumulate the risks, don't be surprised when every
| authority not only ignores you, but also becomes very annoyed
| if you insist on it.
| tbihl wrote:
| _collision_ hot spots. It 's hard to call them accidents when we
| deliberately build infrastructure that so reliably causes
| collisions.
| pfisherman wrote:
| I read the underlying research publication, and linked editorial
| has overhyped the results beyond all reason.
|
| The main takeaway from this work is that better data equals
| better models. The data fusion approach taken by the authors is
| the most interesting thing about it. The comparisons to baselines
| is the weakest part of the article. The effort to sell this as a
| highly significant result is just sad, but is mostly a reflection
| of the state of academic publishing.
| h4kor wrote:
| AI learns to detect major intersections in satellite images
| batch12 wrote:
| While not related, I have always thought it would be interesting
| to plot police hot spots from Waze data..
| burlesona wrote:
| It's interesting that they are doing this, but it's not
| particularly novel. The vast majority of accidents happen on
| roads that meet certain criteria:
|
| - Speed Limit > 30mph and < 60 mph
|
| - lots of driveways and left turns
|
| - moderately heavy traffic at some times of day but not constant
| gridlock
|
| Just picture the commercial drag strip and the collector roads
| that wind between huge garden apartment complexes or gated
| subdivision.
|
| Accidents are especially likely where two such streets cross.
|
| Why?
|
| These are the futon of transportation. They're designed first for
| high speed and volume of traffic, but also high direct access to
| the surrounding businesses. These objectives are horribly in
| conflict and not safe to combine. People want to drive FAST on
| these, and they do, but they are frustrated by the stop and go
| nature and there is a constant stream of "surprises" when other
| drivers take a chance on a turn through a tight gap or run a
| light that just turned red because they're sick of waiting. One
| moment of distraction for either party and BAM, a crash.
|
| Good streets for local access are small and slow moving (high
| volume can be accommodated by a parallel network of such streets,
| ie "a grid" but it doesn't have to be perfect squares). Good
| roads for high speed are wide, clear, and simple, with lots of
| extra room to cushion mistakes (medians, shoulders, etc.)
|
| All this model has really done is learned to recognize new
| "stroads" that don't have a crash history yet, but will soon.
| flashfaffe2 wrote:
| So is AI really needed here?
| hetspookjee wrote:
| Well I think it might actually democratise some of the business
| logic you mention. Sure it makes sense from an experts view,
| yet these designs are still made plentiful. So what if you
| embed this approach in your development plan to have it develop
| around it. Eg implement it as a cost function in the overall
| implementation. I think that's pretty sweet, and it can also
| validate the statement you made in one fell swoop because it is
| a model.
| adrianN wrote:
| So called Stroads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
| goodpoint wrote:
| Stroads are really terrible. It's amazing how they can be
| legal in US.
| avs733 wrote:
| Because the engineering design doesn't just prioritize cars
| it fundamentally presumes cars. If the result is something
| unsafe:
|
| 1) they will use individual responsibility arguments on
| drivers to blame them
|
| 2) blame pedestrians or cyclists or whoever for failing to
| defer to cars
|
| It's not a legality problem it's a philosophy one.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > It's not a legality problem it's a philosophy one.
|
| This is not a dichotomy. The legal aspect comes from the
| "philosophical" one that comes for lobby money.
| avs733 wrote:
| I agree, but I think for the purposes of this
| conversation it fits...laws emerge from the philosophy.
| simply making an effort to change the laws won't change
| the philosophy, it will just be an anachronism standing
| against the dominant philosophy.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| This doesn't fully explain the phenomenon because stroads
| are terrible for drivers.
|
| They cause congestion and are much slower than actual
| roads, while still being unfriendly to pedestrians and
| bikers. They're bad for drivers and bad for pedestrians.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| They're cheap and they get land owners who want access to
| shut up. "there, you have your road, now stop telling us
| how to spend your tax dollars"
| landryraccoon wrote:
| It's even worse. They're not cheap at all. They're cheap
| to build but expensive to maintain.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/5/the-true-
| cost-o...
| bane wrote:
| What's really terrible about stroads is the phenomenon of
| the later "bypass" roads that are built long after the
| stroad/city center turns into a an absolute clusterfuck and
| aren't usable for the kind of high-speed transit they're
| designed for. The bypass roads usually take the form of a
| parkway or some other roadtype with limited
| entrances/exits.
|
| But then later, because the bypass road is usually built on
| cheap land outside of the city center, all that property
| gets bought up and developed as well, and the property
| owners will demand ingress/egress to their properties.
| Since the environment is nicer than the snarled up city
| center, people will start to favor businesses and housing
| in this area. Over the next 10-20 years the bypass will
| simply turn into another stroad. To make matters worse, the
| bypass and the original road will often have the same road
| numbers, differentiated by either "business" or "bypass",
| making navigation confusing.
|
| Where I live I often see multi-million dollar homes being
| built right next to high-speed roads, and instead of a
| feeder street system taking cars to a more limited number
| of ingress/egress points, they simply dump the driveways
| out into the 60mph traffic. Total insanity.
|
| It really does all come down to poor planning, and a lack
| of desire to make street planned city center grids with
| mixed-zone housing and municipal managed central parking
| areas. Instead each business sits in an island in a sea of
| their own giant parking lots, which often sit mostly unused
| which makes urban centralization impossible.
| syshum wrote:
| Then if you live long enough you get to see the bypass
| get a bypass of its own and the entire process starts
| over again...
| sbierwagen wrote:
| The "International Fire Code" (A US regulation used nowhere
| else outside of North America) mandates roads 20 to 26 feet
| wide for fire equipment access: https://twitter.com/graykim
| brough/status/1404824443600490501
|
| One can assume from this requirement that fighting fires is
| impossible in Europe, and residential buildings are
| constantly burning to the ground with firefighters standing
| around, helpless to intervene.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Aren't US homes wood framed and EU homes more likely to
| be made from solid brick/rock?
| CalRobert wrote:
| depends on where you are in the EU I think, UK and
| Ireland still use piles of blocks but no shortage of wood
| houses in Europe. There's a whole industry of building
| woodframe houses in the Baltics and shipping them around
| Europe, incidentally.
| mgbennet wrote:
| Brick houses still burn; interior walls, floors,
| ceilings, and furnishings are still made from wood or
| other flammable materials. There have been plenty of
| castles that caught fire, despite their stone walls.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Wow this video perfectly captures what I thought about
| visiting the US. At the time I couldn't describe what was
| making me critical of the way it was built, but this is so
| well described.
|
| In Europe a street as wide as that would be a main
| thoroughfare. I seemed to see them all over in the US, like
| every road in a grid would be super wide, but also have
| shops.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Futons work pretty well unless you need a 10/10ths bed or a
| 10/10ths couch. These roads are the same. They're fine until
| you load them with enough traffic to make all the intersections
| dangerous but not enough to slow them down.
| airza wrote:
| They're really not; even outside of their horrendous safety
| record they are also responsible for the death of pedestrian
| traffic in the US and canada
| nerdponx wrote:
| To be clear, high-end futons are actually really nice.
| Stroads have horrible safety records, futons do not.
| However there is always a trip and fall hazard around
| furniture. Please exercise caution when maneuvering
| indoors.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| What's your point? Every road with mixed traffic is going
| to be responsible for the death of pedestrians. If
| pedestrians were on highways they would get killed there
| too.
|
| These roads aren't ideal but they're everywhere because
| they're cheap. Unless you can wave a magic wand and make
| municipalities rich enough to carpet bomb everything with
| traffic lights, dedicated turn lanes and sidewalks there
| are going to be tradeoffs.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I think he meant people don't walk anymore because the
| roads are fundamentally made for cars.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I highly recommend the linked video (posted just above).
| It is not a natural law that pedestrians die on
| streets/roads, but it is a result of this typical North
| American road design.
| ghaff wrote:
| And carpet bombing traffic lights everywhere isn't really
| an answer even aside from cost. When some new retail went
| in near me, a bunch of traffic lights were added. To be
| clear, the adjacent interstate exchange was a really
| lousy intersection at busy times of the day. But the mass
| of street lights now make a straight shot through the
| intersections about a 5-10 minute process to go maybe a
| quarter mile.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >But the mass of street lights now make a straight shot
| through the intersections about a 5-10 minute process to
| go maybe a quarter mile.
|
| I'm sure all sorts of wonderful pedestrian friendly moves
| get pulled by people trying to get ahead in that game.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are essentially no pedestrians there (and no
| explicit pedestrian crossing). It's basically the
| boundary between a mostly rural exurb and a small city's
| sprawl. What it does have is one of those stupid zipper
| merges immediately after a traffic light which encourages
| aggressive drivers to jump the merge queue on a regular
| basis even if it means effectively running someone off
| the road.
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| I talked about this a little bit yesterday, but I live in an
| area with a lot of traffic fatalities and it seems to me to be,
| at least in part, an economic issue.
|
| I live in one of the poorest neighborhoods on the outskirts of
| my US city. There are a few major roads headed toward the more
| affluent neighborhoods and downtown. What I see when I run
| along/across or drive along those roads is mostly through-
| traffic. There aren't a lot of "shops" in my neighborhood, but
| one or two strip-malls and a few gas-stations and fast-food
| "restaurants".
|
| Anecdata: In my experience, the areas with less through-traffic
| (and thus high-danger traffic) are areas with destinations,
| whether they're shops for goods and/or services or restaurants
| (that don't involve cars). The reason I think it's economic is
| because it's not just about the customers/consumers visiting
| these areas, but the workers. I'd bet that a not-insignificant
| number of workers in my neighborhood drive to another
| neighborhood for work, but the inverse is probably not true
| (that a lot of folks from other neighborhoods drive here for
| work).
|
| I think part of the solution is to make communities smaller and
| more friendly to their inhabitants. There should be
| opportunities for work in these poorer neighborhoods, and that
| means the services to support them.
|
| It doesn't matter what number is on the speed limit sign on
| these major roads, people will drive 50 anyway (I have been
| passed in the turn lane several times because I drive the speed
| limit on a 2-lane (one each direction) + turn-lane road).
| prawn wrote:
| On your last point, a friend who works in urban planning
| talks about the idea of designing roads to encourage a
| certain speed rather than relying on speed limits. Narrower
| streets or intrusions for greenery, etc will tend to lower
| the speed of traffic.
| mc32 wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere some transit authority was trying
| to improve traffic flow into either the Lincoln tunnel or
| Holland tunnel.
|
| The result of the simulation was both interesting but also
| unrealistic.
|
| In order to improve intake from the feeder streets the
| simulation recommended something no normal drivers would do in
| rush hour: IIRC it wanted drivers to obediently and predictably
| do alternate lane merges as well as some intricate braided flow
| pattern. It was great if you were working with logical
| components but utterly impractical in reality. I don't think
| any semblance of that system was ever implemented as it was
| obvious it would fail worse than the current bad design.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Zipper merges! It's my understanding that that's a norm in
| some countries, but that's a social issue and not an
| infrastructure one.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Most of society seems to have a problem with the notion of
| allowing someone else first ultimately means faster for
| everyone vs the asshats that actively speed up to
| block/deny someone from being able to merge ahead of them.
| To me, these are the same people that complain about a
| single longer queue rather than individual queues for each
| register.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Zipper is best and I completely agree that "society as a
| whole" just doesn't understand it and are outright
| hostile towards the correct behaviour.
|
| Whenever traffic is slow, I make a point of always
| driving up exactly towards the merge and just sliding
| into the flow of traffic. Many many times, someone will
| be pissed at that, either on the way there because my
| lane is free, sometimes for a very very long stretch and
| they try to cut me off because I'm 'bypassing' the line
| or even at the merge, where I just let someone through
| but then it's my turn but they cut me off.
|
| What do these people think? The 2 lane highway is
| supposed to become a 1 lane highway just because there's
| a merge ahead (say because of an accident)? How far back
| is it supposed to become 1 lane? 100 meters? 500 meters?
| 10 kilometers? I've seen some crazy long lineups with
| nobody on the second lane for multiple kilometers. The
| line could easily have been half as long if everyone just
| stayed on their lane until the merge point and zippered.
|
| I remember seeing an experiment on TV (Germany) like 20
| years ago, where they had a large truck adhere to the
| zipper rule, merging exactly where they're supposed to
| and filming it (doing it over and over) and there were
| many many cases of the truck having to brake hard as
| people tried to 'slip by'. This was a 'soft zipper' i.e.
| lots of space to the front with just lines marked out
| where the truck could come to a standstill/slow down and
| go on, so it was a safe experiment.
|
| Which ultimately is one of those cases that demonstrate
| that some ideas are good and 'correct' but "not
| implementable with humans."
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes but more than just zipper merges. There was street
| realignment which also included a braided flow (crossing
| lanes because not only would they need to funnel traffic
| from so of canal to the tunnel but also allow them to get
| off on a local street before the point of no return to the
| tunnel and same for the 'uptown' side) anyway it was an
| over complicated solution that only worked in simulation
| and not with real cars and trucks so none of it was
| implemented.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm less familiar with downtown but the whole area around
| where the Lincoln Tunnel access is in Midtown is a
| snarled mess. You have the Port Authority, aka one of the
| world's worst bus terminals, and more generally just a
| bunch of intersections that are such a mess that you need
| cops directing traffic because otherwise you just get
| gridlock between cars trying to make turns and
| pedestrians trying to get across streets.
| InitialBP wrote:
| These have been implemented in a lot of places extensively,
| such as Germany. There are also some implementations in the
| US. One such that I drove on often is when I-70 eastbound
| runs into the beltway at Baltimore, MD.
|
| The only problem with zipper merging (much like roundabouts)
| is a lack of education around how they work and WHY they
| work. Adjust the education we give new drivers and over time
| our roads will become more efficient.
| mjevans wrote:
| CGP Gray's simple solution to traffic and good visuals.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
|
| The real simple solution to traffic is no more monkeys
| driving cars. Also, implicitly, fully isolate cars from
| human powered forms of transportation.
| mc32 wrote:
| There is a slight flaw there. It fails to account for
| vehicle malfunctions (blown tires, running out of power,
| component failure, roadway debris, etc.) so even with
| computerized coordination you need to keep a speed
| determined safe distance from vehicles in front of them.
| (with reference to the accordion effect of stop and go.)
| creato wrote:
| People are taught to use turn signals, and are reminded
| "keep right except to pass" every 2 miles. Unless there are
| a lot of blatantly illiterate people driving around, they
| just don't care about the conventions of the road, and I
| doubt education is going to change that.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It would be impossible for a non-expert to recognize these
| roads without hand-holding training. There are few quantitative
| criteria ("lots of"), and many that are only understood
| relative to a persons experience ("Just picture ... "). Yet,
| they are well-defined and the problem is well understood.
|
| Perfect application of AI/ML. The reasoning behind AI/ML does
| not need to be mysterious for it to be an appropriate solution.
| "All it has done is <Something I understand> " is not a valid
| criticism of the solution.
|
| "All it has done is add these values and subtract these values"
| would not be a valid criticism of a banking application, for
| example.
| brundolf wrote:
| I once heard AI described as (paraphrasing), "Imagine you
| have an army of seven-year-olds that you can instruct to do a
| simple task for 24 hours a day"
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >These are the futon of transportation.
|
| Not getting the futon analogy?
| boyd wrote:
| Futons are neither good couches nor good beds.
| masklinn wrote:
| What? Futons are not at all couches and great beds (for
| some people anyway, but I like'em). Do americans mean
| something weird by futons?
| Jill_the_Pill wrote:
| Yes, there was a fad for making mattresses that sort of
| fold into a weak, uncomfortable couch. That combo is
| called a futon here. Now they have frames that give them
| some supportive structure, but the earlier ones looked
| like this: https://thehousingforum.com/single-futon/
| masklinn wrote:
| Ah so it's a kind of sofa / pullout bed, with a
| continuous folding mattress instead of the older "split"
| style
| ghaff wrote:
| Which is not generally true if you have good (i.e. more
| expensive) futons.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| And likewise if you throw a dedicated turn lane and some
| sidewalks at these roads they do a pretty ok job.
| ghaff wrote:
| Unprotected lefts have been widely recognized as one of
| the tasks that are especially difficult for autonomous
| driving to handle--which, of course, means that they can
| be relatively tricky for people too. And, yes, well-
| defined places to walk and cross streets help pedestrians
| --at least if they use those defined places which they
| often don't in cities.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Absolutely not. If you're ever in Calgary, take a walk
| along Macleod trail near the Chinook centre. The
| sidewalks are filled with face-height street signage in
| the walkway, the sidewalks randomly venture between
| vehicle lanes, they'll sometimes just end, there are
| pedestrian road crossings without markings or signage,
| etc. It's one of the most unpleasant built environments
| I've ever encountered, up there with polluted Soviet
| mining cities.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I'm sure someone somewhere has managed to do it wrong but
| where I live it's done decently well and there's a fair
| number of main roads that meet the description I gave and
| are fine as a pedestrian, not perfect but fine.
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