From guardrails to potholes, AI is becoming the new eyes on America’s roads

As America’s aging roads fall further behind in much-needed repairs, cities and states are turning to artificial intelligence to spot the worst dangers and decide which solutions should be prioritized.

Authorities in Hawaii, for example, are distributing 1,000 dashboard cameras to try to reverse a recent rise in traffic deaths. The cameras will use AI to automate inspections of guardrails, road signs and pavement markings, instantly discerning minor issues and emergencies that warrant dispatching a maintenance crew.

“It’s not something that’s looked at once a month and then they sit down and figure out where they’re going to put their vans,” said Richard Browning, chief commercial officer at Nextbase, which developed the dashcams and imaging platform for Hawaii.

After San Jose, California, began installing cameras on street sweepers, city staff confirmed that the system correctly identified potholes 97 percent of the time. They are now extending their efforts to parking surveillance vehicles.

Texas, where there are more miles of highway than the next two states combined, launched a massive AI plan less than a year ago that uses cameras as well as cellphone data from registered drivers to improve safety.

Other states use this technology to inspect traffic signs or develop annual traffic congestion reports.

In the coming weeks, Hawaii drivers will be able to sign up for a free dashcam worth $499 as part of the “Eyes on the Road” campaign, which was tested on service vehicles in 2021 before being suspended due to wildfires.

Roger Chen, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Hawaii who helps facilitate the program, said the state faces unique challenges maintaining its outdated highway infrastructure.

“The equipment needs to be shipped to the island,” Chen said. “There’s a space constraint and a topographical constraint that they have to deal with, so it’s not an easy problem.”

Although the program also monitors things like street debris and faded paint on the tracks, the companies behind the technology particularly tout its ability to detect damaged guardrails.

“They analyze every guardrail for condition, every day,” said Mark Pittman, CEO of Blyncsy, which combines dashboard feeds 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 killed in 2020 after crashing into a guardrail that was damaged in a crash 18 months earlier but never repaired.

In October, Hawaii recorded its 106th traffic fatality in 2025, more than all of 2024. It’s unclear how many of the deaths were related to road problems, but Chen said the grim trend underscores the timeliness of the dashboard program.

San Jose reported early success in identifying potholes and road debris simply by installing cameras on a few street sweepers and parking enforcement vehicles.

But Mayor Matt Mahan, a Democrat who founded two tech startups before entering politics, said efforts would be much more effective if cities contributed their images to a shared AI database. The system can recognize a road problem it has encountered before, even if it happened elsewhere, Mahan said.

“He sees, ‘Oh, it’s actually a cardboard box wedged between these two parked vehicles, and that counts as debris on a roadway,'” Mahan said. “We could wait five years for it to happen here, or maybe we have it within reach. »

San Jose officials helped create the GovAI Coalition, which went public in March 2024 to allow governments to share best practices and potentially data. Other local governments in California, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas and Washington, as well as the state of Colorado, are members.

Not all AI approaches to improving road safety require cameras.

Massachusetts-based Cambridge Mobile Telematics has launched a system called StreetVision that uses cellphone data to identify risky driving behaviors. The company works with state transportation departments to identify where specific road conditions fuel these hazards.

Ryan McMahon, senior vice president of corporate strategy & company development, was attending a conference in Washington, D.C., when he noticed that StreetVision software was showing a massive number of vehicles braking aggressively on a nearby road.

The reason: a bush obstructed a stop sign, which drivers didn’t see until the last second.

“What we’re seeing is the accumulation of events,” McMahon said. “That led me to an infrastructure problem, and the solution to that infrastructure problem was a pair of garden shears.”

Texas authorities are using StreetVision and various other AI tools to address security concerns. This approach proved particularly useful recently when they scanned 250,000 miles of track (402,000 kilometers) to identify old traffic 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 that in the numbers somewhere,” said Jim Markham, who handles crash data for the Texas Department of Transportation. “Having AI that can sense and sense that is a force multiplier that essentially allows us to look wider and further, much faster than we could just drive objects.”

Experts in AI-based road safety techniques say what is being done now is largely just a stepping stone for a time when a large proportion of vehicles on the road will be driverless.

Pittman, the Blyncsy CEO who worked on Hawaii’s dashcam program, predicts that within eight years, almost every new vehicle — with or without a driver — will have a camera.

“How do we see our roads today from the perspective of a grandmother in a Buick but also from Elon and his Tesla? » Pittman said. “This is a very important nuance for transportation departments and municipal agencies. They are now building infrastructure for humans and automated drivers, and they need to start closing that gap.”