The city of Las Vegas is partnering with two companies, Numina and Motionloft, in smart city projects to enhance pedestrian safety in its downtown Innovation District.
The purpose of these pilots is to observe foot traffic and cyclists as they interact with their surroundings, including vehicular traffic, and record data that will aid the city in improving its street design to achieve better flow and fewer unsafe areas. The City Council recently established its Innovation District in the urban core to concentrate smart city technology infrastructure investment.
The area is home to new transportation infrastructure and mobility technologies, allowing for the creation of partnerships with autonomous vehicle/mobility companies and smart city technology companies.
Numina provides cities with data to make places more walkable, bikeable and efficient. Its sensing and data platform uses computer vision to generate flow data about bicyclists, pedestrians and other objects in streets. The information is provided in real time to show how people interact with the built environment so that planners can assess infrastructure usage at the street level, and suggest redesigns to fit how people actually use the space.
“It’s great to see Las Vegas eager to invest in and test the next generation of civic technology,” said Tara Pham, CEO and co-founder of Numina. “There are a number of conditions, projects, and events downtown that present exciting opportunities for us to test our capabilities; plus, we appreciate the city’s feedback, to ensure that we’re providing the intended value to the community. The day we installed our sensors, it was over 115º, so it’s definitely a great place to test the limits of our hardware!”
Motionloft is a San Francisco-based technology company that designs, develops, and manufactures proprietary hardware and software, which provides real-time and historical pedestrian and vehicle traffic count data. Motionloft’s sensors are used to analyze pedestrians, bicycles, and vehicles outside a location, and to obtain customer foot traffic and behaviors within a retail space. By having access to this data and the associated metrics, users can identify trends and make decisions.
[Above image: Numina]
Motionloft’s CEO, Joyce Reitman, commented, “We’re proud to be an innovation partner to Las Vegas, supplying advanced technology giving real-time information about how people and vehicles move through intersections. The goal of improved safety and traffic monitoring is enabled by our platform, with discrete sensors that feed data to a dashboard, with live reporting.”
