ATSSA Annual Conference, February 20, 2023 (Newswire.com) - Today, Blyncsy announced their new Safety Awareness Feature Exchange (SAFx), a new public and open source data feed that will allow anyone to access information on the location of roadway safety assets at any time. The announcement follows the company's recent launch of their initiative to report work zones and upload data to the Federal Highway Administration's Work Zone Data Exchange. The SAFx will have a similar model to the WZDx initiative.

These initiatives are all part of a broader goal to reduce roadway fatalities and support Vision Zero. It also follows Secretary Pete Buttigieg's recent launch of the Department's National Roadway Safety Strategy Call to Action campaign, which asks stakeholders to commit to specific actions in 2023 to reduce serious injuries and deaths on our roadways, which have reached crisis levels. 

Blyncsy will use their new machine vision technology, Payver, to automatically detect roadway safety features like crosswalks, school zones and curve warning signs to support the Vision Zero Network through the power of data. Currently, traffic deaths are the leading cause of death for children and young adults. Blyncsy hopes to change this statistic and pave the road to zero traffic deaths by creating an open source, public data feed.

Payver uses machine vision to automatically detect assets like curve warning signs, crosswalks, and school zones. Blyncsy will upload this data to the open-source SAFx feed. Payver leverages crowdsourced dashcam imagery and artificial intelligence to detect anything the eye can see. This crowdsourced imagery is powered by over 400,000 dash cams already in cars across the nation. With this extensive coverage, Payver has the ability to upload and detect safety-related features to public feeds in as little as 60 seconds.

The SAFx initiative emerged on the heels of the award of 510 transportation grants this week, totaling more than $800 million as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law to agencies that, for the first time, focus on road safety such as by adding bike lanes, lighting, protected left turns and sidewalks. SAFx also will also help accommodate the quickly approaching future of autonomous driving. By feeding infrastructure to driver communication channels with automated and real-time updates, Payver allows real-time communication between roadways and drivers of today and tomorrow. 

"With Payver, agencies can finally be able to build infrastructure through the lens of an autonomous vehicle with safety in mind," said Mark Pittman, CEO of Blyncsy. 

Payver's vision-based approach to data collection makes the technology a unique tool for agencies since many autonomous vehicles will use vision-based software to understand the world around them.

"By allowing everybody to understand where safety critical assets are, we can accommodate for the inevitable future of connected autonomous vehicles, while also increasing safety for drivers of today," said Pittman.