Alphabet’s urban technology spinoff, Sidewalk Labs, announced yesterday that it would transform 800 acres of Toronto into a high-tech smart city, complete with drone deliveries and robotic taxis.

A key part of that future vision is rethinking the way cars and people interact, with the goal of helping prevent the more than 270,000 annual pedestrian fatalities around the world.

Until now, much of that effort — from Alphabet and others — has been dedicated to building self-driving cars that steer around obstacles and automatically brake to avoid collisions. But a London-based design firm recently unveiled a new intelligent crosswalk that’s just as smart as today’s autonomous cars.

The crosswalk, reinvented

The Starling Crossing replaces dumb asphalt with a nonslip road surface that's embedded with computer-controlled LED lights that keep vehicles and pedestrians safely separated. A working prototype, located in London, relies upon some of the same basic technology used in self-driving cars.

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Cameras mounted on streetlights feed images of the area to a computer vision system that recognizes and tracks the movement of people, cars, and cyclists. A neural network crunches the data to predict the path of every road user — and, if necessary, light up the road surface instantaneously to warn of danger.

If a smartphone-distracted pedestrian starts to cross against the light, for instance, the sidewalk beneath him lights up with a personalized warning signal that’s impossible to ignore. If a child darts between parked cars, drivers are alerted with a red “buffer zone” that forms on the road around him.