Pedestrian Crossing Distance
In this talk, Arunav Gupta will share a project that used computer vision and OpenStreetMap data to automatically measure the length of 2.7 million pedestrian crossings across the 100 largest U.S. cities. By training a segmentation model on satellite imagery to distinguish roads from sidewalks and pairing that with mapped crosswalks, the team calculated crossing distances with 93% citywide accuracy. The results reveal which corridors are especially hostile to people on foot, with median crossing distances ranging from 32 to 78 feet across cities — and show how newer, more car-centric cities tend to have wider, riskier streets. The findings point to how AI tooling can help planners and advocates quickly identify dangerous crossings and push for safer, more walkable designs at scale.
Arunav Gupta (he/him) is a software engineer at CoreWeave with a Master's in Data Science from NYU, where he worked with urban scientists to understand how street design shapes how we move through cities.
A Better Billion
A Better Billion is NYU Marron Institute Transportation and Land Use Program's latest planning report coupling subway and housing expansion into one comprehensive program. Inspired by the underlying opportunity cost of the Mayor's campaign platform of free buses, A Better Billion explores how subways and housing together tackles the core affordability challenge in New York City using available public data platforms and tools.
Zhexuan (Franklin) Tang is an Assistant Research Scholar in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute. He holds B.A Specialist in Architecture from University of Toronto, and a M.Sc in Applied Urban Science & Informatics at NYU Tandon Center of Urban Science & Progress (CUSP). Franklin is a firm believer of the cross-pollination of ideals, experiences and application-driven mass-mobility development. He is an author of A Better Billion, most recently published housing and subway expansion planning report for New York City. Previously, he participated in editing and writing the Program’s regional rail planning framework, Momentum with Nolan Hicks, and his Masters’ capstone project delivered a subway ridership study for a local transit advocacy non-profit, QueensLink.
Nolan Hicks is a Research Scholar in the Transportation and Land Use program of the NYU Marron Institute. He’s spent a decade reporting on and writing about New York City government and politics, including authoring investigative pieces that examined how the MTA designs subway stations and why city services frequently fail to reach the needy and mentally ill. His stories across his career have prompted reforms and helped lead to federal prosecutions. At Marron, he led the group’s development of a groundbreaking passenger rail modernization design framework, Momentum, that was released to acclaim in 2025. Nolan’s current projects include further developing the Momentum framework by applying to major transit systems in the US beyond New York.