Driving Transportation Planning Forward with AI-Powered Data

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) play a critical role in ensuring the safety and well-being of their communities. They must navigate a constantly evolving landscape while working to create safe, sustainable transportation networks that support the needs of all residents. To stay ahead of the curve, innovative MPOs, like the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance planning.

This blog explores how SEMCOG, propelled by offering its citizens best in class transportation, leveraged AI-powered data from Ecopia AI (Ecopia) to identify critical infrastructure gaps, such as missing marked crosswalks and limited sidewalk access across its region. Using this data, SEMCOG developed a strategic, data-driven approach to address these challenges and create a safer, more equitable community.

How AI-powered data is transforming the landscape

Imagine a pedestrian preparing to cross the street, relying on clearly marked crosswalks and accessible sidewalks for safety. Nearby, a transportation planner examines up-to-date, high-resolution digital maps of the region, pinpointing gaps in pedestrian infrastructure and envisioning new bike lanes that could connect neighborhoods. This is not a distant vision—it’s happening now. Forward-thinking organizations are harnessing the transformative power of AI-driven geospatial data to revolutionize transportation planning and make data-informed decisions that are shaping the future of our communities.

Leading the Charge: SEMCOG’s Vision for Safer Streets

MPOs are the unseen architects of safer, more efficient transportation systems. They juggle evolving demands—rising populations, diverse mobility needs, sustainability goals—and must find data-driven ways to plan for the future. The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) stands out as a pioneering MPO, leveraging cutting-edge AI-powered data from Ecopia to gain unprecedented clarity into their region’s transportation infrastructure.

By using Ecopia’s advanced mapping systems, SEMCOG isn’t merely keeping pace with changing needs; they’re creating a high-definition lens on their transportation networks—one that reveals every curb, crosswalk, and sidewalk with pinpoint accuracy. The result is a tangible, measurable improvement in accessibility and safety that directly benefits the region’s 4.8 million residents.

The challenges of manual digitization

For years, MPOs have relied on geospatial information to guide planning decisions. Data on sidewalks and crosswalks is crucial for evaluating compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG). These details ensure sidewalks meet certain widths, crosswalks are clearly visible, and connectivity supports access to critical public resources. 

To obtain comprehensive data, MPOs may resort to manually digitizing paper maps or imagery. Many GIS programs provide tools to trace and georeference real-world features on a raster image, converting them into interactive vector map features for more detailed analysis. While this method is effective for extracting small amounts of data, it becomes highly labor-intensive and time-consuming when scaled. For example, manually digitizing thousands of miles of sidewalks or tens of thousands of crosswalks across an entire city or state is like counting grains of sand. As communities evolve, roads are repaved, sidewalks upgraded, and new bike lanes added, keeping pace with these changes through traditional methods is both slow and unsustainable. The result is incomplete data, reliance on guesswork, and reactive planning, rather than the proactive solutions needed to serve growing communities effectively.

These inefficiencies don’t just bog down planners—they hinder progress. Planners need current, accurate, and comprehensive data at their fingertips, not just to map out what’s there, but to imagine what could be. That’s where AI-powered geospatial data comes in, offering a breakthrough that can transform both the speed and scale of planning efforts.

Improving efficiency with AI-powered geospatial data 

Fortunately, new technologies are revolutionizing this process, eliminating the need for costly manual digitization. Ecopia’s AI-powered mapping systems deliver a level of precision once achievable only by dedicated GIS professionals—except now it’s done in a fraction of the time, and with the ability to update regularly. This is done by using high-resolution imagery to extract detailed vector layers for various transportation infrastructure features, including crosswalks, sidewalks, bike lanes, turning lanes, street trees, intersections, medians, and more. Having trained on tens of millions of km2 of imagery, and developed a robust computing infrastructure, data is delivered in just a couple of weeks across full regions. This provides communities with up-to-date, detailed transportation data at scale- improving efficiency by enabling GIS professionals to focus more on analysis and innovation, rather than tedious manual digitization.

Unlocking innovation with AI-powered geospatial data

SEMCOG is committed to enhancing mobility solutions that improve safety and support economic growth and development across its region. As a forward-thinking agency, SEMCOG is setting an example for other regions, showing how embracing innovative solutions can lead to more effective and sustainable planning outcomes. 

Serving nearly 5 million people across the seven counties of Southeast Michigan—Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, St. Clair, Washtenaw, and Wayne—SEMCOG leveraged Ecopia’s AI-powered geospatial data to enhance its transportation planning efforts. The next section will explore how SEMCOG used this data to assess the accessibility and safety of their sidewalk networks, ultimately improving the overall efficiency of their planning process. 

Early adopter spotlight: SEMCOG's innovative use of AI in transportation planning

In 2019, the SEMCOG team set out to gain a clearer understanding of pedestrian networks in the area. The question was straightforward: How many residents live within 100 feet of a sidewalk, and how accessible are crosswalks throughout the region? The first step to answering this question would be to conduct a sidewalk and crosswalk asset inventory. Recognizing that manually digitizing these assets would be a lengthy and labor-intensive process, SEMCOG partnered with Ecopia. 

In just three weeks, Ecopia’s AI-mapping systems extracted over 24,000 miles of sidewalk data with width attribution, 160,000 crosswalk polygons, and 4,000 parking lot polygons across SEMCOG’s 5,000 square mile area of interest, with the same level of accuracy as a GIS professional. This enabled SEMCOG to efficiently identify gaps in their transportation infrastructure, assess sidewalk access across the community, and strategically plan for the future with a focus on achieving equity in sidewalk access. 

By conducting a sidewalk gap analysis and proximity study using this data, SEMCOG found that only 76% of the region’s population lived within 100 feet of a sidewalk, and just 23% of crosswalks were marked. These insights guided SEMCOG's infrastructure planning, helping to improve the region’s walkability by making sidewalks and crosswalks more accessible and safer for pedestrians.

Building on success: expanding the partnership  

After the success of their initial data delivery, Ecopia and SEMCOG expanded their partnership in 2022, to gather even more data about their community’s infrastructure. The new layers included detailed mapping of buildings, sidewalks, driveways, roads, parking lots, railways, pavement, grass, bare land, trees, tree canopy, and waterbodies across Southeastern Michigan. This data was leveraged by a variety of stakeholders throughout the region including water councils and urban planning departments to help support public infrastructure decision-making related to stormwater and flood management, pedestrian safety and traffic engineering, and green infrastructure planning.

Armed with AI-driven data, Southeast Michigan’s leaders can now foresee where stormwater might collect, how new green infrastructure could mitigate flooding, or where traffic engineering can improve pedestrian safety. It’s a domino effect: more accurate data begets smarter decisions, which lead to more equitable, sustainable, and connected communities.

Paving the way for safer, connected communities

SEMCOG’s proactive embrace of Ecopia’s cutting-edge AI-powered data is a blueprint for other municipalities and states. Picture a future where transportation planners don’t just react to changing conditions—they anticipate them. Imagine autonomous vehicles navigating seamlessly because planners had access to granular data before anyone else. Or envision a city’s climate resilience bolstered by the latest topographical insights, ensuring infrastructure investments that stand the test of time. This is what Ecopia’s technology enables. 

SEMCOG’s success story shows that embracing innovation isn’t just about adopting new tools—it’s about unlocking entirely new capabilities. With AI-driven geospatial solutions like Ecopia’s at their disposal, planners can confidently explore active transportation initiatives, carbon reduction strategies, and network-wide systemic safety screens. They can move from static paper maps to a living, breathing digital framework that evolves alongside the community. This isn’t just planning—it’s future-proofing.

To explore how AI-driven geospatial data can support planning in your community, get in touch with our team.