Look what’s passing by

Is it a bike or a bus? A pedestrian or a truck? For anyone living in a street with heavy traffic, the answer to these questions is critical. But urban planners also benefit from traffic counts – they can use them to assess the impact of traffic management measures, for example. “Traffic counting is often very costly and complex, however,” says Kris Vanherle, co-founder and CEO of the Belgian company Rear Window. “We want to make it simple and affordable while simultaneously involving the public based on citizen science.” That’s why the company, a subsidiary of Transport & Mobility Leuven (TML), developed Telraam, a small-scale device that anyone can place inside a window at home in order to count road users. The new version – the S2 – uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “This helps us to differentiate between road users with greater accuracy. For example, Telraam can now tell us whether what’s coming past is a bike or a moped, a truck or a bus. That wasn’t possible before,” says Kris Vanherle. “The device’s installation and use have also been simplified and made more intuitive.”

Telraam devices have already been installed in windows in Germany as well. In Berlin, for example, they are used by citizens’ action groups that are campaigning for the establishment of neighbourhoods where through traffic is banned – known as superblocks – and need traffic data to make their case. Telraam devices have also been placed in windows by safer street campaigns. “In Belgium, for example, local authorities have used Telraam to set up school streets; this means that roads are temporarily closed to traffic before the start and end of the school day, mainly to improve safety. Telraam can provide valuable data on where there is spillover traffic during these periods and whether pupils are changing how they travel to school. This also helps to defuse conflicts with local residents.”

For the next version, Kris Vanherle would like to see even more citizen engagement – in the interpretation of gathered traffic data, for example. In that case, Telraam would no longer just be a “counting window” – ik tel and raam mean “I count” and “window” in Dutch, and telraam is also the word for “abacus” – but one which provides further information. Telraam poses no risk to data protection or privacy, incidentally. “The device does not save or transfer images; all it does is count – and thanks to AI, it now does so more accurately than before.”