According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, there are an average of 700 work zone fatalities every year in the US — 700 too many. In addition to impaired or distracted drivers, insufficient maintenance of traffic (MOT) equipment can present serious jobsite hazards.
Traffic control devices (TCDs) are used to divert traffic from work zones and guide drivers safely through work zones, such as traffic cones, barricades, and warning lights that are staged throughout a site depending on the phase of a project; however, they can easily get damaged, misplaced, or removed from the work site entirely.
Since maintaining TCDs is key to the overall safety of a work zone, protecting the lives of workers and motorists, what’s the best way to ensure they’re used correctly during the duration of the project?
Construction contractors need to be able to increase the efficiency of their MOT inspections to identify potential hazards, prevent/reduce accidents, and protect themselves from losses and high insurance premiums.
Each year, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) holds its National Work Zone Awareness Week, sponsoring activities that bring widespread attention to the cause. We're reminded that work zone safety is a critical issue, protecting not only highway workers on foot but drivers as well. However, manual monitoring of TCDs continues to be a challenge, taking up time and resources as inspectors have to drive the whole route multiple times a day to review one large project. This kind of manual review is subjective and can be error-prone.
New safety technology in construction has emerged to help monitor and manage TCDs and enhance safety---automatically! Drones can be used to quickly capture conditions of large worksites, such as highway work zones, without disrupting ongoing work or traffic. And inspectors / construction contractors can use AI to easily analyze drone imagery of an entire project's MOT equipment setup. Using AI to automatically detect and locate TCDs eliminates the time-consuming and potentially dangerous process of manual roadway inspections, allowing inspectors to easily ensure that everything is in its correct place and verify that their work zone conforms to the original roadway design plan.
New advanced technologies bring exciting opportunities for more efficient and safer projects, but clients often hesitate to adopt them due to cost and privacy-related concerns.
KCI's BRYX platform offers a cost-effective Traffic Control Device Detection model that is designed to deliver detailed insights to roadway project teams while also safeguarding data and removing the complexity of understanding how to use and deploy AI. The model is pretrained to detect a wide variety of traffic control devices, automatically generating annotated images and summary reports. With our Traffic Control Device Detection model, construction contractors can get immediate insight into the safety of their work zones.
Ready to learn more? Visit gobryx.com to browse our offerings and start a free trial.