(By MATT PIKE)
Whether you love it, or hate it, artificial intelligence is becoming more common place in businesses, and now also to help city officials.
St. Joseph Public Works Director Abe Forney says the city is now using a program called Road AI to determine street projects.
Forney says what formerly happened to find these projects was a worker from the city traveling roads and scoring them to pick out road repairs each year
“This Road AI is basically a phone that attaches in the car that this gentleman will drive around in and it scores and analyzes our streets, it’ll do our signage, and it really is AI,” Forney says on the KFEQmunnity show. “It’s technology that’s going to get our roads analyzed and we can use that data to figure out what streets we’re going to repair first.”
Forney says the program looks for everything from cracking in the roads to potholes, and then assigns that road a score
“This road scores at a 20, and this road scores at a 90, so obviously the 20 needs to be repaired before you go to the 90,” Forney explains. “And then we can help put in the amount of traffic that goes on.”
Forney says this AI program is just another tool that workers now have to help.
“Our guys have done a really good job of grading the streets, but it just takes it out of human error, takes that human factor out of there,” Forney says. “So, it just analyzes the street and then gives us that information that we can use.”
Forney says the program will also cut down on the time it takes to evaluate the streets, taking about half the time that it currently does with workers grading streets.
(You can follow Matt on X @KfeqMatt and St. Joseph Post @StJosephPost.)