It took Bell around three weeks to develop the algorithm and his system took about a day to analyze the traffic cam footage. The results showed that the bus lane on the block covered by the camera was blocked 57 percent of the time while the two bike lanes were blocked 40 percent of the time. Based on those numbers, Bell determined that approximately 850 vehicles had blocked the bike lane during those 10 days and 1,000 blocked the bus lane.

And while these findings are based on just one city block and a short period of time, the other 101 miles of bus lanes and 435 miles of bike lanes throughout the city suffer from the same issues. It's a problem many people want a solution to. In that regard, Bell has made his source code available on GitHub in the hopes that more people will use it and get a more accurate understanding of the scope of the problem. "We have big problems especially when it comes to transportation," Bell told the New York Times. "I am hoping that just seeing the data will help it be less ignorable."

Image: Alex Bell via the New York Times