About the series
A patient watch over
one Boston crosswalk
There is a painted crosswalk outside a window near Northeastern. It has no signal and no stop sign. It has only the law, which in Massachusetts asks a driver to yield to a person on their half of the road, and a few feet beyond it.
A small camera in that window watches the crossing. Software follows each car through the painted band and asks one question of every passage: was someone owed the road, and did the driver give it to them? Most of the time the answer is dull, which is the point. When it is not, a short clip is kept.
Verified by a person
The detector is a keen but excitable naturalist. It is wrong often enough that nothing it merely suspects is counted here. Every figure on this site, and every episode, is an event a human watched and labelled: yielded, failed to yield, no obligation, or honestly unsure. Close calls that the reviewer judged were no one's fault are counted as exactly that.
Why a nature documentary
Because a driver rolling through a crosswalk at eighteen miles an hour, observed with the hushed reverence usually reserved for a leopard, is funnier and more memorable than a spreadsheet. The best of the clips are re-cut as episodes: a title card, a slow push-in, the moment itself in slow motion, a freeze-frame and a field guide to the specimen, a score, and a solemn narrator.
The script is written from the event's own measurements, usually by Google's Gemini, and read by a synthetic narrator; each episode's credits say who. The score is synthesised from scratch. A human chooses which episodes are published, and nothing is published without being watched first.
Who the joke is on
The drivers, and the documentary's own grandeur. Never the person crossing. Pedestrians are not described, named, or mocked; they are simply people trying to get to the other side. Nobody is identified. Licence plates are never read, stored or shown, and the published episodes carry the narration and score only, not the street's sound.
The small print
- One camera, one crosswalk, one window. The numbers describe this crossing and no other.
- Speeds are estimated from the crosswalk's own width. They are honest estimates, not radar.
- Nights, rain and a tree in the way all make the detector's life harder. Doubtful events are labelled unsure rather than guessed.
- This is a student project, not an enforcement tool and not a study of anyone in particular.
Filming continues.