Street Activity Sensors: the count is kept, the video is not
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✎ Corrected 23 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 2 sources. What changed →
New York's transportation department installed computer-vision sensors at 20 locations and announced on 2 June 2026 that roughly 80 more are coming, for about 100 across the five boroughs. They count pedestrians, cyclists, buses and vehicles and assess patterns in how people use the streets, replacing the manual traffic counts the city had used to design them. DOT says video is processed in real time and immediately discarded, with only anonymous data retained, and that faces and licence plates are obscured. A separate city testbed pilot ran 12 VivaCity sensors across four boroughs from July 2023 to April 2024, under the same deletion rule. No party outside the city has tested either claim.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 4 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 4 addressable claims, 2 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 4
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-670ea9be135bbeed
quantitative
installed computer-vision sensors at 20 locations and announced on 2 June 2026 that roughly 80 more are coming, for about 100 across the five boroughs
Sources carrying this claim
clm-f1166d52f95c9d03
descriptive
They count pedestrians, cyclists, buses and vehicles and assess patterns in how people use the streets
Sources carrying this claim
clm-c2840d4e5f7afd76
descriptive
video is processed in real time and immediately discarded, with only anonymous data retained, and that faces and licence plates are obscured
Sources carrying this claim
clm-1e7fc8036d471250
quantitative
A separate city testbed pilot ran 12 VivaCity sensors across four boroughs from July 2023 to April 2024, under the same deletion rule
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:d074449afb0732834aa8529a03990e82167ed70bb99ae4898ef37480ca1ce4d4
- 4
- of 4 claims mapped
- 2
- source dossiers
- 1
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- New York City Department of Transportation; the city testbed pilot used sensors from VivaCity
- Actor types
- city-government, private
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
2 source dossiers
NYC DOT — New Cutting-Edge Sensors to Better Understand How New Yorkers Use Their Streets
- Stable source ID
src-40ff7a6f459f386d- Publisher
- Name not classified · nyc.gov
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2026-06-02
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-20
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-23
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Operator announcement: the 20 initial locations, the roughly 80 additions, what the sensors classify, and the retention wording.
NYC Smart City Testbed — Street Activity Sensors (computer vision pilot)
- Stable source ID
src-75c13589766d8cf8- Publisher
- Name not classified · testbed.cityofnewyork.us
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-20
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-23
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Undated programme page. Documents a separate, earlier testbed pilot: 12 VivaCity sensors in four boroughs, July 2023 to April 2024. Not the same deployment as the DOT programme, and kept apart in the entry for that reason.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Street Activity Sensors: the count is kept, the video is not” — New York City, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/nyc-street-activity-sensors/ (last verified 2026-08-20). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.