Two years ago, New York City partnered with data scientists at Datakind and Microsoft to build the “holy grail” of road safety engineers: a software platform capable of predicting and quantifying the outcome of any given engineering intervention. Would a bulb-out at 7th and 39th reduce crashes? By 10 percent, 27 percent, 62 percent? How about a pedestrian crosswalk signal?
The model turned out to be overly ambitious for the small number of crash-prevention features currently on New York streets, and the amount of data the city has on them.
