Leveraging USDOT’s Safe Streets and Roads for All Program to Build a Data-Driven Platform for a Safer Future
The U.S. faces an ongoing roadway safety crisis. Each year, we lose approximately 40,000 lives to crashes, along with millions of injuries, and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic and societal costs. Despite decades of policy interventions, we significantly lag peer countries in roadway safety.
The stark reality demands a new paradigm, one that shifts from reactive measures to a proactive, systems-based approach. It is no longer enough to respond once crashes have already occurred. We must also systemically identify and mitigate the underlying risk embedded throughout the transportation system.
This transformation requires a rich, data-driven backbone, detailed enough to guide infrastructure decisions and upgrades on a road-by-road, block-by-block basis. Currently, few if any regions or communities maintain a comprehensive, high-fidelity, digital record of their infrastructure assets, like the presence and accessibility of their sidewalks, widths and pavement markings of their roadways, or location and content of their signage. The information that they do have is often incomplete, out-of-date, and fragmented.
A New Approach to Advancing Roadway Safety
New and emerging technologies – artificial intelligence, LiDAR sensing, computer vision, and the internet-of-things – are now making it possible to build comprehensive, high-fidelity maps and geospatial databases of our surface transportation system. With scalable digital infrastructure solutions, the impossible becomes possible: standardized and easy-to-use data foundations that help identify and prioritize roadway safety interventions at a community, regional, and even national scale.
Bentley Systems is at the forefront of this movement. Building on decades of leadership in infrastructure software, Bentley has integrated a set of solutions that serve as a technology platform purpose-built for modern safety challenges and roadway design and operational priorities. By leveraging Blyncsy’s real-world crowdsourced imagery from over 1.2 million connected vehicles and expanding coverage through Google’s Street View imagery, the platform delivers unprecedented visibility and usability of the details of any surface transportation system. When complemented with Bentley’s OpenPaths Patterns’ aggregated, anonymized hourly travel volumes, a full roadway safety picture is in place: roadway features, roadway usage, infrastructure conditions, construction projects, signage, and safety conditions for vulnerable road users. This data then becomes the foundation for planning, prioritizing, and even discovering transportation safety interventions.
A Strategic Opportunity: USDOT’s FY25 Safe Streets and Roads for All Program
Now is a pivotal moment to harness these capabilities. In March, the U.S. Department of Transportation released the NOFO for the $1 billion FY25 Safe Streets and Roads for All Program (SS4A), available exclusively to local governments, including MPOs. Responses are due June 26, 2025. $300 million is dedicated specifically to planning and demonstration activities, including the use of innovative technologies that support safety. This program has a simple application process with a 2-3 page narrative and in prior years, these planning and demonstration funds have been undersubscribed, making the probability of receiving funding very high. These grants are available to entities seeking first-time funding from SS4A or those who are building on prior SS4A awards. This is a great way to secure federal funding to invest in a capability that will advance your community’s roadway safety efforts for years to come.
Meeting our roadway safety goals requires precision at every block, corner, and corridor. We invite you to partner with Bentley to empower your community with the digital foundation it needs to dramatically accelerate progress toward those critical goals.
Ben Levine serves as Director of Market Development at Bentley Systems. He previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He can be reached at ben.levine@bentley.com
