The answer is almost certainly yes, as a recent Associated Press report shows.
I have been less than complimentary in my treatment of artificial intelligence in some of these columns. Any new technology can have potential hazards, and one of the main tasks of those who do engineering ethics is to examine technologies for problems that might occur in the future as well as current concerns. But there's no denying that AI has potential for saving lives in numerous ways, including the improvement of road safety. The AP article highlights AI's contributions to road safety, mainly in the area of information gathering to allow road crews to allocate their resources more intelligently.
Road maintenance is unique in that the physical extent of property an organization or government is responsible for, exceeds the area of almost any private entity. Just in my town of San Marcos, a town of about 70,000 people, there are hundreds of stop signs, dozens of signals, and hundreds of miles of road. And in the whole state of Texas there are over 680,000 "lane miles" of road, more than any other state. Just inspecting those miles for damage such as potholes, worn-out signs, and debris is a gargantuan task. Especially if a problem shows up in a low-traffic remote area, it could be years before highway workers are even aware of it, and longer before it gets fixed.
In Hawaii, the highway authorities are giving away 1,000 dashcams equipped to send what they see on the road to a central AI processing facility which will pick up on things like damaged guardrails, faulty signs, and other safety hazards. The ability of sophisticated AI software to pore through millions of photos for specific problems like these makes it possible to use the floods of data from cameras to do this with minimal human involvement. Hawaii has to import virtually all its equipment and supplies for road maintenance, so resource allocation there is especially important.
San Jose, California has mounted cameras on streetsweepers and found that their rate of identifying potholes was 97%, and will now expand the program to parking enforcement vehicles. And driver cellphone data can pinpoint issues such as a stop sign hidden by bushes, which caused drivers to brake suddenly a lot at a particular intersection in Washington, D. C. later identified by AI software. The mayor of San Jose, a former tech entrepreneur, hopes that cities will begin to share their databases so that problems common to more than one area can be identified more quickly.
The application of AI to identifying road maintenance needs seems to be one of the most benign AI-application cases around. The information being gathered is not personal. Rather, it's simply factual data about the state of the road bed and its surroundings. While places such as Hawaii and other locations that use anonymized cellphone data do interact with private citizens to gather this data, their intent is not to spy on the people whose dashcams or phones are sensing the information. And it would be hard to exploit such databases for illicit purposes, although some evil people can twist the best-intended system to their nefarious purposes.
All the data in the world won't help fix a pothole if nobody goes out and fixes it, of course. But the beauty of the AI-assisted data gathering is that a much better global picture of the state of the road inventory is available, allowing officials to prioritize their available maintenance resources much better. A dangerous pothole in a part of town where nobody much goes or complains won't get ignored as long now that AI is being used to find it. And data-sharing among municipal and state governments seems to have mostly upsides to it, although due precautions would have to be taken to make sure the larger accumulation of data isn't hacked.
As autonomous vehicles become more widespread, the database of road hazards could be made available to driverless cars, which would then "know" hazards to avoid even before the hazards are repaired. To a limited extent, this is happening already.
Whenever my wife runs her Waze software on her phone when we're on a trip, the voice warns us of stalled vehicles or law-enforcement personnel before we get to them. I've often wondered how the system obtains such ephemeral information. It seems almost inevitable that it uses anonymized location data from the stalled cars themselves, which gives one a slightly creepy feeling. But if it keeps somebody from plowing into me some day while I'm fixing a tire on the side of the road, I'll put up with the creepy feeling in the meantime.
Highway fatalities in the U. S. have been declining overall since at least the 1960s, with a minimum of less than 33,000 a year in 2011. Since then, they rose significantly, peaking after COVID at a rate of 43,000 in 2021, with a slight decline since then. Part of the increase has been attributed to the rise in cellphone use, although that is difficult to disentangle from many other factors. While most traffic accidents are due to driver error, bad road conditions can also contribute to accidents and fatalities, and everything we can do to minimize this factor will help to save lives.
The engineering idealists among us would like to see autonomous vehicles taking over, as there are some indications that accidents per road-mile of such vehicles can be lower than those shown by cars with human drivers. But the comparison does not take into account the fact that most truly autonomous cars are operating over highly restricted areas such as city centers, where circumstances are fairly predictable and well known. General suburban or rural driving seems to pose serious challenges for autonomous vehicles, and until they can prove that they are safer than human-driven vehicles in every type of driving environment, it's not clear that replacing humans with robots behind the wheel will decrease traffic fatalities overall, even if the robots get clued in about road hazards from a national database.
At least in this country, the citizens will decide how many driverless cars get on the road, and for the foreseeable future we will have mostly humans behind the wheel. It's good to know that AI is helping to identify and fix road hazards, but even if such systems work perfectly, other things can go wrong on the road.
Sources: The AP article "Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety" by Jeff McMurry appeared on the AP website on Nov. 15, 2025 at https://apnews.com/article/ai-transportation-guardrails-
potholes-hawaii-san-jose-9b34a62b2994177ece224a8ed9645577. I also referred to the websites https://blog.cubitplanning.com/2010/02/road-miles-by-state for the lane-miles figures and
https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/Fatalities%20and%20Fatality%20Rates.pdf for road fatality rates.
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