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Council approves traffic analytics software and connected-vehicle data subscriptions to guide traffic safety work
Summary
Council approved two technology purchases — a five‑year City and Crash analytics license and a three‑year UrbanSTK connected-vehicle data subscription — intended to help police and traffic engineers target crash reduction and traffic-calming projects; council raised privacy and integration questions.
The Odessa City Council approved two items March 25 to give police and engineering staff data tools for identifying crash hotspots and traffic patterns.
The council approved a five‑year license for a crash analytics product (referred to in staff materials as City and Crash) at $311,238 that will ingest crash reports, map collisions by latitude/longitude, apply natural-language processing to officer narratives and produce budgeted, real‑time mitigation options. Staff said the vendor will backfill three years of historical data to provide a baseline.
Council also approved a three‑year subscription to a connected‑vehicle data product (referred to as UrbanSTK) that uses aggregated telematics from connected vehicles and GPS sources to provide speed and flow data across the city. Staff said the connected‑vehicle product does not collect personally identifying information and provides travel‑time and speed heat maps the city can use for traffic calming, signal timing and planning.
Police and engineering staff described operational uses including quicker routing for first responders, identifying low‑cost engineering countermeasures and providing objective evidence when residents complain about speeding. Matt Davidson, presenting the City and Crash product, said, “It reads the officer's narrative through our AI algorithm and gives us real time solutions to our crash problems in Odessa.”
Councilmembers asked whether the connected-vehicle data identifies individual drivers and whether the products can integrate with signal timing systems; staff said the data is proprietary third‑party telematics from connected vehicles and that the supplier estimates connected‑vehicle coverage will grow from roughly 43% to a much higher share in coming years, and that the system can help analyze travel time between points though direct integration with signal controllers was not certain.
Some councilmembers voiced concerns about privacy and wanted assurance that no personally identifying driver data would be handed to the city; staff repeatedly affirmed that the vendor supplies aggregated speed and location information rather than driver identities.
Both purchases passed unanimously. Staff said the City and Crash purchase is budgeted and that the UrbanSTK subscription includes a 3% annual price escalator for usage.
