98 Proactive Traffic Safety
We're joined by Brett Ferrin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-ferrin-8504b8346/) VP of Sales at Traffic Logix. Together we have a conversation about how technology and data can be used to proactively improve traffic safety. If you're into data, urban planning, or transportation, this is an episode for you.<br><br>Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- Traffic Logix: https://trafficlogix.com/<br>- Vision Zero: https://www.cdc.gov/transportation-safety/vision-zero/index.html<br><br>Music Credit: Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a show that looks at the way technology, politics, and policy impacts the world around us. The tools we use, the way services are delivered, and how we talk about and set policy all shape our society. We'll gather around and have a chat about these things together and more. Before we get started, I do wanna let you all know that we've started a Discord for the podcast. There will be a link with an invite down in the episode description. Do feel free to go check that out. It's a small community right now, but hoping to grow it. It's a great way to reach out to me and let me know things that you might want us to cover or to just hang out and talk about Civic Tech. Brett, thanks you thank you so much for joining us here on Civic Tech Chat. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do? Absolutely, Ryan. Thank you so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure to,
have these conversations. So my name is Brett Farren. I'm the vice president of sales for Traffic Logix, and we are an international manufacturer of traffic calming devices, but data collection devices as well. And so, we're gonna have a good conversation today. I know about traffic in general, but I look forward to, talking a little bit more about Traffic Logix and what we do as a company. I've been with Traffic Logix for a little over fourteen years. Been in traffic safety for a little over twenty years, and, I've also been in civic government. So I, served six years on city council in my local community. And so I've I like to say that I have a little bit of experience from a lot of different aspects, but we'll have some some good conversation today, and I hope to share some fun stories about my experience in traffic safety over the years.
We can have a fun time talking about traffic. For listeners, probably sitting in traffic, it'll be a a fun one.
Good point.
And, Brett, what would you say is your personal why? The thing that drives you to get out of age of mourning and do what you do.
That is something that I think about a lot. And I wouldn't say that, I chose traffic safety as much as traffic safety chose me. I don't know that would have been my career of choice, but now that I've been in it as long as I have, safety is a big deal. I have a family. I have grandchildren now. And, my goal is to try and make sure that not only my family, my friends, and those that I love, but everyone in society gets home safely and has dinner at night. And, I take that personally.
And since, traffic safety has chosen you, as you put it, you've managed to cultivate a rather long and prolific career in the field. What's something that you've learned along the way that you'd share with folks that are maybe earlier in their career adventures?
I I think that, one of the things that really I have to chuckle about, and I could tell a dozen stories about it, but personal perception plays into to traffic safety. So you have that person that is out there mowing their grass, and they hear that loud car go by, and it sounds like they're doing a 100 miles an hour. And what I've learned is perception isn't necessarily reality, and data is an important part of traffic safety. We we tend to make a lot of decisions. A lot of, a lot of our opinions are based upon that perception of what is going on around us. But if we can go to data driven decisions, they're usually better decisions and, based upon something that's real, not just perception.
When we were prepping to record, we talked a little bit about your love of things that are outdoors. And I also saw in your bio that, it mentions you raise game birds and even care for a pear tree. What inspired you to start those things, and what inspires your love for the kinda outdoors?
When I was younger, I, I actually had a neighbor that invited me to work in his orchard. And so I grew up working in an orchard, and he had all kinds of different fruit trees. And I learned to to care for those true fruit trees, prune those trees. And and that is carried over into my personal life. I have what I consider a a fairly large orchard in the backyard, and I love caring for those trees just I love the fruit, but I also just love the process. Now along the way, I had a father who, taught me early on the love of the outdoors. We spent a lot of time camping. We spent a lot of time fishing, hunting, do those doing those things. And actually, when I was in college, my dad came to me and said, hey, why don't we try raising some pheasants or some partridge or something along those lines? And so, my dad got me into it, and then we didn't do it for a while. And finally, my, my boys when they were older said, hey, dad. Why don't we try doing this? We missed out on this when we were younger. So we've raised, partridge. We've raised quail. We've raised pheasants. It's just kind of a fun little hobby that we've done.
Today, we're getting together to talk about using Internet of Things devices and data for traffic safety and the pursuit of something called Vision zero. To get us going, can you tell us a bit about what vision vision zero is and why it's important?
Yes. Vision zero is critically important, and it's actually an international kind of a buzzword, but it's a it's a policy that a lot of cities are adopting. And what it basically means is we wanna get to the point of zero fatalities on the roadway and, zero pedestrian deaths, zero bicyclist deaths. It's not just cars crashing into each other, but it's it's fatalities in the in general. So zero deaths. And, there's a lot of different ways that cities are trying to approach that process, but vision zero is very, very important. There's a lot of money from federal governments, state agencies thrown into that Vision zero concept.
As I read about Vision zero, it seemed to me that a key aspect of the philosophy is an assumption of agency. Instead of thinking about crashes as accidents or fatalities as accidents, the idea sounds like you should see them as preventable events. Am I am I getting the right idea about kind of the
push behind it? Yeah. Absolutely. If you think about driving under the influence, you know, that's a decision that we make to get behind the wheel. We can prevent a lot of deaths by eliminating that decision of driving under the influence. Speeding is a decision that we make. Whether or not we're going to go that suggested speed limit or we're gonna try and get there faster. There's a lot of those choices that we make that we don't think about the impact that they can have.
The US Department of Transportation has something that they call the safe system approach, where the agency describes it as a guiding paradigm for addressing road safety. What do you think about it, and how does it fit in with this idea vision zero we're talking about?
Well, it's a very, very complex, narrative, program and whatever however you wanna just just describe that. And they did that in well, in my opinion to, kind of determine who was going to get some of that federal funding. So they had to come up with some type of a process for evaluation purposes. There's a big, federal grant in The United States called, SS four a's Safe Streets for All, and, their evaluation is based upon this criteria that the National Transportation Safety Board has come out with of how do we evaluate whether or not a community is trying to do what they need to do, what are they going to do with this money, how are they going to use it, will it be as impactful as what it should be? And, I I'm not, I'm not a traffic engineer, so I'm not going to, comment on whether that's good or bad. But I do think having a process for evaluation on how to spend money is always a good
thing. As we get maybe to, more specific methods and things in with our conversation, where do you see Internet of things devices fitting into what we're talking about? How can they help a municipality striving to make and meet those vision zero commitments?
Technology is a wonderful tool, and that's one thing that I've really, had to stay on top of in my career. There's what we might refer to as dumb devices, that being traffic cones and orange barrels and and things that are out there in a construction zone. But when it comes to the Internet of things, we now have, for for example, artificial intelligence AI. We have, WiFi. We have fiber. We have so many different things that connect us, in ways that we didn't even have ten or fifteen years ago. Cellular signal. You look at just cell phones in general. There's so many things that are allow us to connect and to get data faster than we've ever had it before. And, I think that is definitely having an impact on transportation, traffic safety, all of those things that we do on a daily basis.
You brought up some of the the technologies that kinda are at play in the space. You know, there's, like, camera driven things. There's vehicle to vehicle network communication, Wi Fi on the roads, various sensors collecting things that are, like, non visible light spectrums, among other types of devices that are out there. If you're a municipality thinking about your strategy for this sort of thing, would your suggestion be to go for, like, a wide breadth, kinda get what you can out there, or are there certain technologies that you think deliver more value than others?
Glad you asked that question, Ryan. When we when we take our approach to traffic safety, we coach our sales team to go out and, first of all, gather data. And so if you're a city and you're trying to make decisions about the future, first of all, it's really important to be able to gather that data and make a data driven decision because it perception isn't necessarily reality. And, I've been in a lot of cities even talking with police chiefs, one in particular where I was sitting down with this police chief and he said, you know, this traffic sergeant that I have, his wife would call me every single day and say, hey, chief. We've got a speeding problem. You've gotta take care of this in the community. You need to do something. Can you put an officer out here? Can you write some citations? Well, he ended up buying one of our data collection devices. We put it out there in front of their home. He gathered data for two weeks. After two weeks, he's he called the sergeant and he said, sergeant, would you go please pick up your wife and come into my office? So we did so. Walked into the office, and he looked at her and he said, here's the report. Now quit calling me. The reality of it is no one is speeding through your neighborhood. It's perception. And so if before we go out and we spend a lot of money on signage, on semaphores, on new technology, let's gather the data. Let's find out where our problems are because the problem, it usually isn't throughout the community. There's what we call hot spots. Let's know what those hot spots are.
Speaking of, finding those hot spots, I imagine that as a municipality deploys devices, a vast amount of data is collected. So as you're trying to kinda figure out what to do with that data, how can those governments and agencies make use of it to shift from something that's reactive, you know, say someone calls them in that, like, in that anecdote that you mentioned versus, hey, like, we're practically looking at this data and trying to say find hotspots or trying to make new policies in response to it.
Yes. This is a question that, has come up the last few times I've been in these conversations. And this is where I think artificial intelligence comes in. I think that we have the ability now to analyze data faster and to get us answers a lot quicker than we've ever had. I was attending a conference. It was actually ITS America conference, and that whole conference that we attended, everybody was talking about the data and all the different source sources that are out there for data. But we had multiple customers coming up to us and saying, we just don't have the manpower or the time to analyze all this data. It's wonderful to have, but what do we do with it? And now, I think what we're finding is with artificial intelligence, we have the ability to to get to the bottom of that data quicker and, get us the answers that we're looking for. And I think that's a that's an amazing tool at our fingertips right now.
So in those cases, are you saying, like, you just probably might take that large trove of data they have. Maybe they have some sort of tool whether it has, like, machine learning embedded into it or generative AI, something along those lines, and effectively use that to generate some sort of insights. So am I following where you're
Yes. Exactly. So we're we're looking at stacks and stacks of data, and and we're looking for a specific piece of data or a specific solution, and to be able to put that into a a learning machine or a chat GPT or something and say, analyze this information and tell me this. That's a lot quicker than going through hundreds and thousands or millions of pieces of data.
In your experience, as you're thinking about folks that have tried to tackle this problem, whether it may be at a municipality or a government agency, Are there any examples of success that come to mind that you would kinda raise up as, like, hey, if you try it this way, you might get somewhere.
I think I would go back to our own company. K? Again, we're a data company, and so we're always trying to provide the best data in the best format. And so I think one of our successes has been using AI to provide that information to our customers in a legible, readable, understandable format. And, I know there's a lot of companies out there that are doing that, but, I think that's one of the challenges that we have being a data collection company is not just providing the data, providing the data that the customer needs.
For your your all use of AI, is that something that y'all took the time and energy to develop in house, or is that something that you went and, like, stopped partnership in order to kinda figure out stuff? We have we have in house about 70 traffic in or 70 engineers
that are, AI engineers as well as software engineers, hardware engineers, but we do all of that background gathering and all of that engineering in house.
And, as we consider traffic safety, there's a a whole sphere of urban planning that kind of is around it and is impacted by and also impacts what we're talking about. How do you see this sort of data as a tool for folks to really think about how their communities are also designed and and developed?
That's a big challenge in the world we live in today. So I live in a small farming community in Northern Utah. And when I married my wife, we moved out to this community. There was about 800 residents 1,800 residents. Sorry. I I misspoke. And it was a farming community. You could see cows everywhere. There was fields everywhere, open fields. We loved it for that reason. Now as I I look out my office window here, I can see multiple fields, but they're all growing houses. And so there's a lot of development going on. But, when I was on the city council a few years ago, one of the biggest challenges we had in our community at the time was a grocery store coming into town. Now you wouldn't think that a grocery store was a you'd think everybody would be happy about that. But for this small little farming community that was growing 30% in population a year, they were very concerned about the impact that that grocery store was going to have. In the, planning world, in the municipal world, there's a a phrase called it's an acronym called NIMBY, and it stands for not in my backyard. And that's what everybody would come in. We're we're all for the grocery store. We just don't want it here. And, anyway, it went through the process. The grocery store ultimately was built, and now it's a wonderful part of our community. And all of those people that hated it in the beginning now love it, but they were worried about the big trucks delivering Pepsi and milk and bread and all of those things and how that was going to impact kids walking to school because there's an elementary school down the road. How it was going to impact traffic. We don't have any street lights in town. Everything is stop signs. And so they were really worried about the amount of traffic that it was going to come in. Urban planning is is critically important, but it's critically important to have good data. And, the devices that Traffic Logix provides helps in gathering some of that information, and there's also a plethora of other manufacturers that can provide data as well. But data driven decisions always lead to better decisions. I know that for a fact.
I suspect that good data you just talked to us to be part of the answer to this follow-up question I have for you, which is a I'm hearing, like, your personal experience kind of interacting with that initial resistance to new development, which I think is something that a lot of folks out in the listener group would relate to in their own communities. Right? Whether you're talking about adding a grocery store or some new housing or making a change to a a road or an intersection, there can be that sort of initial resistance to a change. How did you kinda go about, engaging with it and trying to persuade to I mean, it sounds like you ultimately got the grocery store. So perhaps something you did there could inform others.
Well, I think from a city council perspective at the time, we went back and we were just trying to help people understand the benefit, the long term benefit of having a grocery store in town. And ultimately, when it comes down to property rights, that's why we have ordinances. That's why we have planning commissions. That's why we have city councils because they're setting that long term vision of what that city looks like. And so if you don't like the vision of where your community is going or what's going on, I think my challenge would be for everyone to attend a city council meeting. Get to know what's going on in your community because I've sat through many, many of those meetings and nobody is there. And yet you go home and you look on Facebook and everybody wants to complain about what's going on. And we have a voice. That's why we elect people. We don't appoint people. We elect them. And, they listen. They do. They listen. And so data is important, but if you don't feel like your community is looking at the data, go talk to them about it and share with them the importance of of data driven decisions.
I've, I've heard it said that, they're like, the folks that do show up to say, like, a town hall meeting or a city council meeting, kind of the views they represent tend to be most represented because they showed up. Right? It's kinda like, what is it? The decisions are made by those who come to the room to make them. In your experience with that in city council, was that kinda what you experienced, kinda the folks that showed up? It was kinda most of the views you heard.
It's interesting because when you have a controversial topic, most of the time, the people that show up are the people that are going to complain, not the people that are going to shout hurrahs. City government is a very thankless job. Nobody's going to ever pat you on the back and thank you for what you did, but they will complain about most everything that you do. And, I don't know that decisions are made based upon who's in attendance, but decisions are made based upon feedback that we get as elected officials and and and and true data. Again, it's not perception. The perception could be this grocery store is gonna be horrible and it's gonna do all these negative things for the community. The reality of it is I can go down the street and I haven't I can buy my family a gallon of milk in less than five minutes and be back home and you know? That's that's a convenience factor. And, look at the housing that's built as maybe I want my children who are married now to come back and live within in our community. In order for that to happen, there has to be growth. Look at that farmer who has farmed that for, I don't know, thirty, fifty, sixty, a hundred years in his family, but now they're saying, you know what? We can't afford to do that. We don't have the desire to do that. We wanna sell off this land, and that's their retirement. They're entitled to sell off their land. They just have to do it within the guidelines of that vision that our elected officials give them.
In our conversation so far, we've talked a lot about data. Ultimately, the vast collection of lots of data. And as we talk about that, we inevitably have to consider, you know, the ethics that can come up whenever you have a whole bunch of data gathered together about folks. One might, for example, be concerned about that old thing of surveillance versus safety as a trade off conversation. They might worry about data ownership and how governance decisions are handled. What is your take for folks that are considering these sorts of questions as top of mind?
Well, let me tell you about the data that we gather. First of all, we we have a plethora of different devices that we sell. Some of those are convert little black covert little black boxes that just gather traffic data, number of cars, the speed, the highs, lows, the averages, all of those things that traffic engineers need to make a decision. But it doesn't take a picture of a vehicle. It doesn't scan a license plate. There's no personal data there. It doesn't even record the time of day when that event took place. It's just gathering raw data. Now, we have speed cameras. Those speed cameras are taking pictures of a vehicle, but it doesn't get a picture of a driver. It gets a picture of a license plate. We don't do anything with that license plate information. It goes to another agency who creates the ticket and connects to a motor vehicle department or something that says who's the registered owner. So we're very, very careful at Traffic Logix about personal data, about those images, about the data that we collect and where it's stored. But, again, there's no names, phone numbers, addresses, nothing stored there that would tell anybody more than what they could tell by driving up and down the road.
From how you describe it, it sounds like you've set intentionally to design tools that avoid identifiable
bits of information by by design as, like, part of how they function. Am I kinda tracking that from how you're describing that? Yes. Absolutely. You know, there are companies out there that have video cameras and other types of data and how they store that data and what they do with it. I I can't speak about that. But at Traffic Logics, that's not what we do. We're about traffic data, not personal data.
This might be about kind of stepping back to that that bigger space where it's there's multiple vendors doing things in different ways. But I imagine and this might be something you have some personal experience with, kinda doing the sales life thing, kinda how procurement happens in these spaces. You know, rules are kind of established for how government will interact with vendors, for how data is gonna be owned and governed. How do you think that procurement stuff, for lack of a better way to put it, kinda interacts with these questions we're talking about?
That really depends on the agency. As you mentioned, they all have their different rules and their and and these are things that, yes, as salespeople, we have to deal with on a regular basis. We get those hard questions about what data are you storing, where is it stored, how is it stored, how private is it, how secure is it. But, that is something that's becoming more and more common with drones, with, all of these things that are the new technology that we've been talking about. There's a lot of information out there. It's not the space that we necessarily play in, but municipalities are going to have to address that and how they're going to, allow that information to be stored, shared, gathered. It's gonna be important part of things moving forward.
If there's maybe, like, an intrepid city manager or maybe a contracting officer working for one listening, and they're like, I kinda open an RFI out, but I'm thinking through it. What advice might you give them about maybe, like, do's and don'ts in the space?
First of all, be clear in what your expectations are. And so, know what kind of data you that you need and make sure that the vendor that you're working with, is aware of personal privacy information and what your expectations are with that information. I I see a lot of RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, whatever you wanna call them, and some of them are very, very well written. But when it comes to privacy and personal information, I don't think we can go overboard. I think we have to be very, very clear and concise in in our expectations.
Other folks maybe have that consideration for privacy in mind, but also have a concern for things like bias in the data. For example, you know, historical data could reflect existing patterns and then strengthen your belief in those patterns when you try to use it in a predictive way. In your experience, how have you tried to how is your organization, like, tried to address those or mitigate those sorts of concerns?
So data analytics is, there's a lot of way different ways to analyze data, whether it's financial data or whether it's it's traffic data. And and we get question on that all the time by different traffic engineers. Mine's superior to mine, and and it makes us better as a company. But, again, our traffic data is usually we could give you that in a PDF format where we're analyzing that data and we're saying, okay. Here's what we found in these bins or in this time frame, or, here's the raw data. Here's a dot CSV file, and you can do with that data and you can analyze it any way that you want. And so that allows them to take out any any thought of, oh, they're manipulate manipulating the data to show what they want to show. We provide raw data as well as a PDF if that's what our customers want.
Okay. It sounds like we're back to the good data theme again where it's like you can choose to trust our analysis, but if you wanna kinda check it, here's the here's the raw data to investigate. Because it sounds like that's the approach.
That's what most traffic engineers ultimately want is that raw data. They wanna analyze it the way that they wanna analyze it, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're we're just fine with that. It's it's more about the decision that is made with the data than it is the data itself. Let them prove the accuracy or the inaccuracy of it.
As, we get near to our close, one of these questions I sometimes like to ask in these interviews is kind of the magic wand one, where it's if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing about the space you're working in, what would it be and why?
Oh, man. I talk about that crystal ball a lot. I I wish I had a crystal ball. But I think if I were to have a magic wand, I would just ask people to take into consideration when you leave the house the decisions that you're going to make. Because the decisions that you make affect other people. Our slogan, our motto as a company is safeguarding your ordinary. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that you, your family, your neighbors, your friends, that you get home for dinner at night. And, we all have a responsibility to make safe decisions, to make wise decisions. And, boy, that magic wand, if I could just wave it over and say, hey. Stop and think about that decision before you go there because it's going to impact somebody, and it could be a negative impact.
Brett, thank you so much for coming on to Civic Tech Chat to talk to us about this topic. It's no doubt important, and then hopefully folks will take some wisdom to it into their days.
Ryan, thank you for the time. It's been a fantastic chat chat. You've been a a wonderful host, and, thank you again.
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