City of Bozeman Signs Contract With AI Software Company To Study Data Related To Car Crashes

Bozeman, Mont. — The city of Bozeman has recently signed a contract with a Washington D.C.-based AI software company as it builds its first safety action plan to help reduce car crashes in the treasure state.  

At intersections across Bozeman, crashes have been a familiar problem, but with the new agreement, city officials are hopeful that the partnership will help city staff study those incidents more efficiently.  

The city has partnered with Citian, a Washington, D.C.-based transportation technology company.  

City officials say the company’s work focuses on AI-powered software aimed at roadway safety, infrastructure and accessibility.  

Nick Ross, Bozeman’s director of transportation and engineering, says the platform is meant to help sort through crash information and pinpoint trouble spots so that officials can better study what causes the crashes. 

“We don’t shoot before we aim, or cut before we measure, and engineering safer streets is much the same way. So, what this platform will do for us is take a lot of safety crash data that we have,” Ross said. “And aggregate that all into a safety analytics platform that will make it much easier for us to identify where the worst problem areas are, and especially what the causes of those crashes have been”. 

Ross explained that the AI software is intended to speed up analysis, not make decisions for the city.  

“All the A-I portion of the software is going to do is ingest all the crash data for us and allow us to do a much better and much easier job querying a lot of information out of those reports,” Ross said. “To ingest a lot of data a lot faster than we could do by hand”.  

The contract was funded through a $500,000 grant awarded to the city. Officials report that the partnership between Bozeman and Citian is expected to take effect by the end of next year.  

As for the next steps, Ross said city staff had begun sending crash data to Citian so it can begin building the platform. 

“We are just now going through, starting the process, of feeding all of our crash data over to them, they’ll then take the time to feed that into their system, develop the platform for us, then we’ll have access to it, where we can actually start using it in development of our safety action plan”, Ross said.