How America's Aging Roads we fall further behind in much-needed repair, Cities and states are turning to artificial intelligence to identify the biggest threats and decide what actions to take first.
Officials in Hawaii, for example, are giving away 1,000 dash cameras in an attempt to reverse a recent surge in cases. Fatal accident. Cameras will use artificial intelligence to automate inspections fencingroad signs and pavement markings, instantly distinguishing minor problems from emergencies that require dispatching a maintenance crew.
“It's not something they look at once a month and then sit down and decide where to put their vans,” said Richard Browning, chief commercial officer of Nextbase, which has developed the dash cams and imaging platform for Hawaii.
After San Jose, California began installing cameras on windshield wipers, city officials confirmed that the system correctly identified potholes 97% of the time. Now they are expanding efforts to park law enforcement vehicles.
Texas, which has more lanes on its roads than the next two states combined, has been underway for less than a year with a massive artificial intelligence plan that uses cameras as well as drivers' cellphone data to be logged to improve safety.
Other states use the technology to inspect street signs or produce annual traffic congestion reports.
Drivers in Hawaii Over the next few weeks, people will be able to sign up for a free $499 dash cam as part of the Eyes on the Road campaign, which was trialled on company cars in 2021 but was put on hold due to the bushfires.
Roger Chen, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Hawaii who is helping implement the program, said the state faces unique challenges in maintaining aging road infrastructure.
“The equipment needs to be brought to the island,” Chen said. “They have to deal with spatial and topographical constraints, so it's a challenge.”
While the program also monitors things like street debris and faded paint on traffic lanes, the companies behind the technology especially tout its ability to detect damaged guardrails.
“They analyze every barrier in their state every day,” said Mark Pittman, CEO of Blyncsy, which combines dashboard data with mapping software to analyze road conditions.
Hawaii transportation officials are well aware of the risks that can arise from broken guardrails. Last year, the state reached a $3.9 million settlement with the family of a driver who died in 2020 after crashing into a guardrail that was damaged in a crash 18 months ago but never repaired.
In October, Hawaii recorded its 106th traffic fatality of 2025, more than in all of 2024. It's unclear how many deaths were linked to traffic problems, but Chen said the grim trend highlights the timeliness of the dashboard program.
San Jose has reported significant success in detecting potholes and road debris simply by installing cameras on several street sweepers and parking enforcement vehicles.
But the mayor Matt Mahan The Democrat, who founded two tech startups before entering politics, said the effort would be much more effective if cities contributed their images to a shared artificial intelligence database. The system can recognize a traffic problem that it has seen before, even if it happened somewhere else, Mahan said.
“He sees, 'Oh, there's actually a cardboard box stuck between these two parked cars, and that's considered roadway litter,'” Mahan said. “We could wait five years for it to happen here, or maybe we already have it on hand.”
San Jose officials helped create the GovAI Coalition, which went public in March 2024 so governments could share best practices and, ultimately, data. Members include other local governments in California, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas and Washington, as well as Colorado.
Not all AI approaches to improving road safety require the use of cameras.
Massachusetts Cambridge Mobile Telematics launched a system called StreetVision that uses mobile phone data to identify risky driving behavior. The company works with state departments of transportation to determine where specific road conditions exacerbate these hazards.
Ryan McMahon, senior vice president of strategy & Corporate Development, was attending a conference in Washington, D.C., when he noticed that the StreetVision software was showing a huge number of cars braking aggressively on a nearby road.
The reason: the bush was blocking the stop sign, which drivers did not see until the last second.
“We're looking at a combination of events,” McMahon said. “That led me to an infrastructure problem, and the solution to that problem was a pair of garden shears.”
Texas officials are using StreetVision and various other artificial intelligence tools to address safety concerns. This approach was particularly useful recently when they scanned 250,000 lane miles (402,000 kilometers) to identify old street signs that were long overdue for replacement.
“If something was installed 10 or 15 years ago and the work order was on paper, God help you try to find it somewhere in the numbers,” said Jim Markham, who handles crash data for the Texas Department of Transportation. “Having AI that can go through this and check is a force multiplier that essentially allows us to look wider and further much faster than we could just ferry things around.”
Experts in artificial intelligence-based road safety technology say what is being done now is in many ways just a stepping stone to a time when most vehicles on the road will be without a driver.
Pittman, the CEO of Blyncsy who worked on the dash cam program in Hawaii, predicts that within eight years, nearly every new car—with or without a driver—will be equipped with a camera.
“How we see our roads today from the perspective of grandma in a Buick, and also from the perspective Elon and his Tesla? Pittman said. “This is a really important consideration for departments of transportation and city agencies. They are now building the infrastructure for both human and automated drivers, and they need to start closing that gap.”
