Automotus assists MIT’s Senseable City Lab with Curbs Project in Paris
Automotus assists MIT’s Senseable City Lab with Curbs Project in Paris
Los Angeles, CA — Paris, France aims to become a 15-minute city within the next five years, and mobility technology leader Automotus is helping to make this happen.
Automotus is assisting MIT’s Senseable City Lab with the Curbs Project in Paris to ensure that residents will have easy access to urban amenities such as parks and street shops within walking distance or predominantly using active modes, such as bicycles and scooters, creating a more vibrant and accessible city.
“It’s great to be working alongside MIT’s Senseable City Lab to help promote mobility in Paris,” said Jordan Justus, CEO & founder of Automotus. “Paris is on the forefront of the mobility movement, and we are thrilled to be playing an important role.”
The project poses technical challenges that require a number of innovations to truly capture the complexity of curb activity. Automotus, a mobility-focused video analytics company based out of Los Angeles, is assisting MIT with this component of the project to expedite their technological development and help Paris achieve its 15-minute city goal. Sai Prajwal Kotamraju, Head of Computer Vision at Automotus, is leveraging his team’s past work in Los Angeles and Turin employing robust datasets generated by Automotus video analytics software to help the MIT team improve their image processing capabilities; specifically for the newer forms of mobility they are analyzing.
In this transition, the curb, which has been historically designed solely as a static barrier between pedestrians and automobiles, is taking on a more dynamic and central role. Senseable City Lab, MIT’s urban research lab, is working with the city of Paris to tackle one of the most complex mobility challenges cities are facing around the world today––identifying patterns of use along the curb to help cities better manage them.
RATP, Paris’ transportation operator, in collaboration with MIT Senseable City Lab, is using multiple sources of public data and combining them with geographic analysis, statistics, and machine learning techniques to measure the daily activity patterns of streets—a key indicator of urban vibrancy. This measure captures how levels of activity along the streets vary across the city.
RATP has been running one of the densest multimodal networks in the world for over seventy years in Paris and around the French capital. Present in 13 countries, across four continents, the RATP Group is a global leader in urban mobility. This is the next step in a long line of innovations.
Upon completing the Curbs project, RATP will have the critical insight needed to encourage more accessible, sustainable, and equitable urban life in the city of Paris. Additionally, the frameworks built by MIT’s Senseable City Lab for better understanding curb activity in Paris will be extendable to urban environments around the world.
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About Automotus
Automotus is building a world where people spend more time where they want to be and less time getting there. The company’s technology empowers communities to measure all forms of mobility, craft data-driven policies, and ensure compliance from all stakeholders.”
Automotus can be found online at www.automotus.co.