This Intelligent Side Walk In Toronto Intends To Reduce Pedestrian Accidents

With a goal of helping to prevent over 270,000 casualties around the world annually, Sidewalk labs has recently unveiled their smart sidewalk in Toronto that will provide better road safety to pedestrians.

Source: Sidewalk Labs

Much of the effort, until now, has been put in designing smart cars that will move around obstacles by themselves and will stop automatically to avoid collisions. Sidewalk Labs, however, is revolutionizing this idea by taking it one step further, i.e, for the most part, collision is an interaction between vehicles and humans.

The crossings in these smart sidewalks will replace asphalt with an LED embedded, computer controlled, non-slip road surface that will keep a safe distance between vehicles and pedestrians.

The path of all the road users will be tracked and predicted by a neural network and will light up the road surface as a sign of danger if necessary.

Source: nbc news
For example, if there is a child darting in some parking area, a red buffer zone will be immediately created between the child and the vehicles. Also if some pedestrian lost in his cellphone tries to cross against the signal, the sidewalk underneath him will light up, giving a warning signal to the pedestrian to ensure his safety.
 This intelligent sidewalk can revolutionize the city realizing the idea of futuristic high-tech cities, but this is just the beginning.

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