Valparaiso will soon be tapping into vehicle location data to find problem speeding areas. The board of works last month approved a license agreement with Urban SDK for traffic management software.
City council president Ellen Kapitan says it will help the city fix potential problem areas. "When I first heard about it, I felt like 'Big Brother's watching,' but we will have patterns of behavior, which is so exciting for knowing where to put resources and knowing where our roads are that need attention or maybe they need redesigned," Kapitan said during last week's council meeting.
Police Chief Andrew McIntyre said the software will help show when and where speeding tends to happen, but won't track individual drivers. "There's nothing that can issue citations, nothing that can identify one single person," McIntyre told council members. "It's done through, like, OnStar and computer programs in your vehicles, and then if you're logged into certain apps, such as like Waze, it tracks information that way."
The software will provide data going back 12 months and give the city updates twice a month. The cost of the one-year license agreement is $23,725.
