UMass study uses drones to improve bicycle safety in Somerville

Three miles from where a cyclist was struck and killed on Monday, University of Massachusetts researchers are conducting high-tech research to make bike paths safer using drones and artificial intelligence software.

Starting this week and next, researchers will fly drones hundreds of meters above several streets in Somerville near Porter Square to record video of traffic and interactions between cars, trucks and cyclists. The videos will be analyzed by AI software to create data that can be used to make recommendations for improving safety, said Eleni Christofa, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The idea is to find out what works and what doesn’t, to suggest changes to cycle lanes, signs and barriers, and to advise on possible new driver training.

Somerville, Cambridge and Boston have added bike lanes, signage and barriers to make cyclists safer. However, these efforts vary greatly depending on street widths and other road features. The busy streets around Conway Park in Somerville, where the UMass study is being conducted, have green-painted bike lanes but are largely devoid of protective barriers against passing cars, trucks and buses — sometimes just inches away.

On Monday, John Corcoran, 62, of Newton was struck while driving on Memorial Drive near the Boston University Boat Marina, where a shared path meets a narrow sidewalk. Bicycle advocates said they have been asking for improved safety in the area for years. Corcoran is the third cyclist death in Cambridge this year.

Christofa said the UMass study will aim to pinpoint the exact type of poor design that may have contributed to Corcoran’s death. “It’s unfortunate,” she said. “When you have protected access to a cycle lane, how do you get those people back into traffic and make drivers more aware of cyclists.”

The five drones that recorded over Somerville this week were from the university’s UMassAir project, in which a team of students, faculty and specialists flew unmanned aircraft on various research missions. This could include everything from live observations of movement to recording infrared videos of a cranberry bog to look for frost damage, said Ryan Wicks, assistant professor and chief equipment technician at UMassAir.

Wicks said it took four months of planning to organize the drone flights and obtain permission to fly up to 400 feet. “It was kind of hard to figure it all out,” he said.

The bicycle safety study will be based on machine learning software from Swiss start-up MobiLysis, which was founded about a year ago from the Urban Transport Systems Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne. The company’s software essentially creates a real-time digital record of everything that happened in the video — for example, monitoring how close a car hit a bicycle. The technology has already been used around the world to provide recommendations on how to improve safety and help cities reduce vehicle carbon emissions through more efficient traffic flows (with fewer starts and stops).

According to Dimitris Tsitsokras, a week of traffic videos from the UMass project, consisting of approximately four to six hours a day of drone footage, will require several days to analyze and convert them into digital data suitable for further analysis using MobiLysis software. senior data scientist who was on site in Somerville.

Drones are the most effective way to collect footage because they are cheaper than installing cameras on the ground and provide a more complete view of road interactions from above, Tsitsokras said. There is also a privacy benefit.

“Drones cannot see license plates or people’s faces at the height at which they fly,” he said. “We can’t identify specific people, so in terms of privacy, it’s pretty safe.”

Christofa said that once videos of traffic flow are converted to digital data, her team will look for potential conflicts and near misses between bicycles and other vehicles. Much of the previous research was conducted in Europe, where cycling is more common. A common suggestion is to move bike lanes closer to the sidewalk, protecting them from parked car traffic, rather than placing parked cars closest to the sidewalk.

“It’s important to learn to ride a bike in the cities we have here in Greater Boston and New England,” she said. “We want to ultimately achieve the Vision Zero goal of zero road-related fatalities and make even more people feel comfortable cycling so that we can move towards sustainable mobility.”

Aaron Pressman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @ampressman.