Road Risk Monitor: A Deployable U.S. Road Incident Forecasting System with Live Weather and Road-Level Tiles

Road crashes remain among the gravest threats to public safety, and preventing them is a defining task of transportation systems worldwide. Much of that harm concentrates at hotspots, yet a hotspot is less a place than an episode; it emerges quietly at an intersection or along an arterial, intensifies for weeks, then subsides, only to reappear elsewhere. Enforcement guided by maps of past crashes inevitably trails this cycle, patrolling yesterday's hotspots while tomorrow's form unwatched. Breaking that lag requires three capabilities at once: detecting hotspots as they are born, forecasting where they will sit next week, and following each one through its life. We introduce HERALD (Hotspot Emergence, Risk Anticipation, and Life-cycle Dynamics), a unified deep learning framework that provides all three from a single statewide model. HERALD distills each county's recent crash history into weekly risk maps and forecasts the next with a CNN--Transformer, whose mixture-of-experts lets one model serve dense urban cores and sparse rural corridors alike. Each forecast is anchored in the county's long-run crash geography, sharpened by the self-exciting effect of recent crashes, and paired with explicit warnings of where new hotspots are about to appear. Followed over time, every hotspot acquires a legible life story, from birth through growth and stability to decline and death. Across six heterogeneous Wisconsin counties, HERALD forecasts more accurately than five identically trained baselines, locates hotspots most precisely, and flags emerging risks before they take hold. A single adjustable setting trades accuracy for extra sensitivity where deployment demands it. The result shifts hotspot management from mapping the past to anticipating the future.

City-wide traffic forecasting is important for congestion management, route guidance, and intelligent transportation systems, but accurate prediction remains challenging when future traffic must be generated as spatial maps over an entire urban network. Existing traffic movie prediction methods have improved frame-level accuracy, yet many still treat forecasting mainly as image reconstruction. This can produce traffic maps that are numerically close to the ground truth but weakly constrained by road layout, connectivity, travel direction, and congestion propagation, especially in cross-city settings where both traffic behavior and road structure change. To address this limitation, this study proposes RCSNet, a road-conditioned spatiotemporal network that reformulates traffic movie prediction as topology-guided future-state generation. RCSNet extracts road-aware representations from static road maps, models multi-horizon traffic dynamics from historical observations, aligns directional traffic features with local road structure, and progressively generates future traffic maps for improved temporal consistency. A structure-consistent learning objective further encourages predictions to remain accurate, road-aligned, and spatially stable. Experiments across multiple cities show that RCSNet improves both forecasting accuracy and structural consistency. In same-city forecasting on Berlin, Antwerp, and Moscow, RCSNet reduces average MAE, MSE, and RMSE by 11.5%, 10.0%, and 5.1%, respectively, compared with the closest baseline. In cross-city testing on unseen Chicago and Bangkok, it reduces RMSE by 10.6% and 10.5% without target-city fine-tuning. Additional horizon-wise, road-structure, explainability, statistical, and efficiency analyses show that RCSNet produces more accurate, transferable, road-aligned, and computationally efficient traffic forecasts.

Accurate and reliable vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for safe autonomous driving. Recent studies have incorporated safety risk into trajectory prediction to quantify dangers posed by surrounding agents. However, most risk-aware approaches use past risk information as a secondary signal to help guide decisions, overlooking its future evolution and uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a risk horizon profiling (RHP) module that incorporates a continuous, learnable potential field model for risk-aware trajectory prediction. The RHP module calculates the spatial-temporal proximity of surrounding objects to profile risk distributions across future horizons, which supports better trajectory prediction by adaptively identifying what human drivers perceive as critical moments. We evaluate our method on two datasets from different driving settings, highD for highway corridors and SHRP2 for urban streets, which cover diverse risk scenarios including safe, near-crash, and crash events. Compared to the baseline methods, our framework achieves a 25.0% reduction in 5s RMSE on the highD dataset and a 29.1% reduction in 5s minFDE on SHRP2. These results indicate strong performance for both short and long horizon prediction and robust generalization across highway and urban scenarios. The proposed method enables more realistic AV path planning and strategic selection, thereby supporting safer autonomous driving and more advanced driver-assistance systems. The source code for this work is available at: https://github.com/bilab-nyu/RHP