Bus transportation is an essential part of nearly every public transit system. From school students to everyday workers, riders depend on buses to transport them to the essential destinations. Because most passengers start or end their journey by walking, providing safe access to bus stops is key to enhancing pedestrian safety.

Pedestrian fatalities in the United States have significantly increased in recent years, with 2022 recording the most fatalities since 1981. While prior studies have analyzed bus stop safety using crash data, not all crashes near bus stops were directly related to the stop itself.

Candace Brakewood, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with Graduate Research Assistant Allison Rewalt and fellow CEE Professor Chris Cherry to address this gap by analyzing fatal transit bus stop-related pedestrian crashes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and comparing them to other nearby fatal pedestrian crashes.

Their research, titled “An analysis of pedestrian safety at bus stops using FARS data,” was recently published in the Journal of Safety Research.

The research was funded through the Center for Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety(CPBS), which is a Tier I University Transportation Center (UTC) that is led by the University of New Mexico and includes UT, and a Dwight D. Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship that Rewalt received.

“Our work is unique because most prior studies used a more localized approach, relying on local or state crash data to understand the risks pedestrians face when walking to or from bus stops, whereas ours uses a national dataset to give us a bigger picture of what these risks look like nationwide,” Rewalt said. “Because our work is generalizable, it can be used to inform bus stop safety improvements across the country.”

Midblock stops present danger

The study uses pedestrian crash data that explicitly identifies bus stop-related crashes, providing a more nuanced assessment of crash risk factors for transit passengers and other pedestrians in the area, compared to previous studies that relied simply on proximity or other measures.

One of the key takeaways from the research is that there are three typical types of crashes that result in pedestrian fatalities at bus stops:

• pedestrians crossing to/from a bus stop at an intersection
• pedestrians waiting on the roadside at a midblock stop
• pedestrians crossing to/from a midblock stop.

Midblock stops are especially high risk, especially on high-speed arterials. Midblock locations increased the chances of a fatal crash by 4.7 to 5.2 times depending on the size of the buffer zone used in the analysis.

Pedestrians waiting on the roadside at a midblock stop is a crash subtype that is distinct to transit passengers, who often wait at the roadside for the bus to come, whereas other pedestrians would typically not be standing on the roadside for an extended period of time.

“This finding stood out because it points to a practical place to focus safety improvement near bus stops,” Rewalt said.

Finding infrastructure solutions

The UT researchers are hoping city planners, traffic engineers, and transit agencies can use their research findings to explore solutions to mitigate risk for pedestrians accessing buses. High-visibility crosswalks, especially at midblock crossings, or relocating bus stops closer to a signalized intersection could be infrastructure improvements to consider.

“We have an ongoing follow-up research project that continues to explore pedestrian safety at bus stops using a different nationwide dataset called CRSS that includes non-fatal crashes,” Brakewood said. “The overarching goal is to identify bus stop-related crash characteristics and determine which factors lead to more severe outcomes. We will have more results to share on the new project in the near future.”

The US Department of Homeland Security is seeking to develop a new mobile surveillance platform that fuses artificial intelligence, radar, high-powered cameras, and wireless networking into a single system, according to federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED. The technology would mount on 4×4 vehicles capable of reaching remote areas and transforming into rolling, autonomous observation towers, extending the reach of border surveillance far beyond its current fixed sites.

The proposed system surfaced Friday after US Customs and Border Protection quietly published a pre-solicitation notice for what it’s calling a Modular Mobile Surveillance System, or M2S2. The listing includes draft technical documents, data requirements, and design objectives.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

If M2S2 performs as described, border patrol agents could park their vehicles, raise a telescoping mast, and within minutes start detecting motion several miles away. The system would rely heavily on so-called computer vision, a kind of “artificial intelligence” that allows machines to interpret visual data frame by frame and detect shapes, heat signatures, and movement patterns. Such algorithms—previously developed for use in war drones—are trained on thousands if not millions of images to distinguish between people, animals, and vehicles.

The development of M2S2 comes amid the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants across the US. As part of this push, which has sparked widespread protests and condemnation for the brutal tactics used by immigration authorities, Congress boosted DHS’s discretionary budget authority to roughly $65 billion. The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” allocates over $160 billion for immigration enforcement and border measures—most of it directed to DHS—with the funds scheduled to be distributed over multiple years. The administration has sought to increase DHS funding by roughly 65 percent, proposing the largest expansion in the agency’s history to fund new border enforcement, detention capacity, and immigration surveillance initiatives.

According to documents reviewed by WIRED, locations of objects targeted by the system would be pinpointed on digital maps within 250 feet of their true location (with a stretch goal of around 50 feet) and transmit that data across an app called TAK—a government-built tactical mapping platform developed by the US Defense Department to help troops coordinate movements and avoid friendly fire.

DHS envisions two modes of operation: one with an agent on site and another where the trucks sit mostly unattended. In the latter case, the vehicle’s onboard AI would conduct the surveillance and send remote operators alerts when it detects activity. Missions are to be logged start to finish, with video, maps, and sensor data retained for a minimum of 15 days, locked against deletion “under any circumstances.”

Since its launch on September 30, OpenAI’s Sora app has dominated the iOS App Store charts, thanks to its easy breezy AI video generation and an initially loose interpretation of copyright laws. On Friday, its reign came to an end. Your new champion is … Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Yes! Not ChatGPT or Gemini or Threads or any of the other usual suspects. Dave’s Hot Chicken now rules over the App Store, where its slack-beaked, bug-eyed mascot icon expresses appropriate surprise at its ascent. How did it do it? How did it break the grasp of OpenAI’s golem TikTok? With something people love even more than large language models: free food.

“They’re running a promotion for free sliders in celebration of Drake’s birthday,” says Adam Blacker, PR director of the app analytics firm Apptopia. “Free food always gets the downloads flowing.”

If you’re wondering what Drake has to do with any of this, he invested in the fast casual restaurant chain in 2021, and presumably made a mint when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for a reported $1 billion. For the third consecutive year, the company gave away one (1) free slider to anyone who has downloaded the app in honor of Drake’s birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today; the giveaway was Thursday.)

“We’re celebrating a celebrity that’s popular and that’s currently relevant, and also getting food in people’s mouths,” says Dave’s Hot Chicken chief technology officer Leon Davoyan.

And it truly is a lot of people. On a typical week, Davoyan says, Dave’s sees between 20,000 and 25,000 new sign-ups to its loyalty database. On Thursday alone the promotion drove 343,531 new accounts—a more than 10 percent bump to the brand’s overall membership in a single day, according to the CTO.

It was enough to knock Sora out of the top slot for the first time since October 3, an impressive stretch for an app that’s still invite-only. In the first 23 days since it launched, Sora racked up 3.2 million iOS downloads in the US, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower. That’s a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which while similarly viral notched 2.3 million US downloads in the same time. (Sora is not yet available in the Google Play Store, but it’s incoming.) OpenAI declined to comment.

While Sora is likely to reclaim the top spot after the Drake promotion dies down, Dave’s Hot Chicken should continue reaping the benefits of its giveaway. Last year, according to Sensor Tower, downloads of the app in the four weeks following the same marketing push were more than 50 percent higher than the month leading up to it. All those free sandwiches are worth the long-term gains.