Downtown telesensors

Municipality of Utrecht

With 18 counting sensors ('passer-by counters') in the Inner City, 9 different modalities are counted 24/7 - 365 days a year, but also functions such as Near misses detection, Occupancy or Dwell Times are available. These counts are used for various themes/issues including economy, mobility, safety, events and area (re)design

Last change on 1st of August 2025, at 11:45 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: Uthiek
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Space and Infrastructure

Begin date

2022-07

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

Counting and measuring modalities and use of public space by modalities in the city for various issues tvb including substantiation of policy, city/area design, liveability, traffic flow and safety

Considerations

Results Uthiek Assessment: by deploying telesensors in the city centre, we contribute to various municipal tasks, such as liveability, traffic flow and safety. In doing so, we as a municipality perform our statutory duty in the right way. This contributes to the value Power relations. The value Privacy is NOT at stake, because personal data of residents (images of license plate cars) are not stored and are deleted directly in the scan car's camera. From the value Control of technology, this was a requirement for the city centre telesensors

Human intervention

The algorithm (with direct impact on Utrecht residents and their living environment) serves only as a source of information for an employee, who takes the appropriate next step based on this information and the context of the situation. This principle is included in our Utrecht framework Internal Guidelines for Algorithm Application

Risk management

The Utrecht data scientists, Information and Process Advisors (IPA) and Decentralised Information Security Officers (DISO) within the Utrecht municipality have, in addition to the employees directly involved, a controlling and monitoring role in the application of the algorithm. By doing so, we want to prevent the following risks from occurring:- data leak due to the public availability of personal data of Utrecht residents- algorithm takes a decision entirely independently, without the intervention of an employee and without the interpretation of the relevant context of the situation- 'function creep' regarding data during the application of the algorithm, as a result of which the algorithm gives a distorted picture of what is going on. This can occur because the same type of data is used when applying the algorithm, and the algorithm uses that as confirmation of what comes out as information

Impact assessment

Utrechts Uthiek Assessment

Operations

Data

Telesensor measurements broken down into 9 modalities

Technical design

The sensors contain an image sensor and edge processor, which directly converts the images to anonymous data (automatically processed into line object and object classification) and destroys the images within microseconds in the sensor