Helping make Ohio’s roads safer

In the last 10 years, there have been almost 60,000 road incidents involving work zones in Ohio, with more than 14,000 of them resulting in either injuries or fatalities. Last year was the worst year for work zone crashes resulting in a record-high 6,574 work zones crashes in Ohio; a 40 percent increase from the year before.

As a result of this data, DriveOhio, an initiative of the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), is partnering with us to pilot CityStream to improve road safety around work zones. The pilot began last week and will run through August along the state’s U.S. 33 Smart Mobility Corridor.

With more than a billion miles driven on the Nexar network by users of our dash cam app and its accompanying cameras, we analyze roadway data and produce insights for cities & states. DriveOhio will pilot Nexar CityStream’s technology to identify and monitor work zones with lane closures, as well as digitally map road signs and monitor them for changes.

Currently, ODOT deploys field technicians to monitor whether roadside safety regulations are being observed at work zone sites but these employees can’t be everywhere at once. Nexar CityStream will allow ODOT to monitor work zones remotely and observe whether they are set up safely for the workers and drivers alike, permit compliance, and which sites are regularly causing traffic build-ups, so public officials can use a data-driven approach to deploy resources when and where they’re needed.

These insights are produced from our community of users, who drive with our dash cam for their protection, and along the way help make roads safer. At Nexar we take privacy very seriously — both our users’ privacy, but also 3rd party privacy. The information that we share with our partners is all anonymized and aggregated, so that it cannot be re-identified. No one has access to a driver’s personal data except for the driver. We are proud to abide by the EU’s GDPR, to be able to provide all our users globally with strict data protection regardless of lesser local legal requirements. We have fully captured our privacy policy and published our data usage ethical pledge.

We are proud to partner with DriveOhio on this initiative and hope to provide the data needed to prevent work zones crashes in Ohio.