College Park City Council members expressed concerns at Tuesday’s meeting about potentially installing permanent stop sign cameras.

A pilot program, which ran from Sept. 3 to 23, installed stop sign cameras at nine intersections across the city to gather data and assess the need for a permanent solution to stop sign running in College Park, according to city documents.

The program was conducted through Obvio — a Silicon Valley company that uses artificial intelligence to detect unsafe driving behavior. Obvio co-founder and CEO Dhruv Maheshwari presented the pilot results at Tuesday’s meeting and responded to council members’ questions.

According to Obvio, Edgewood Road and 52nd Place had the most daily stop sign violations with 756 during a traffic study from Sept. 15 to 20. This accounted for 82 percent of the vehicles passing through the intersection, Obvio’s website showed.

At the meeting, Maheshwari presented videos Obvio collected around College Park showcasing drivers driving aggressively and speeding through stop signs.

Mayor Fazlul Kabir said the videos were “very scary” to watch. He also voiced concerns that residents may view the program as a “money-making machine.”

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District 4 council member Maria Mackie expressed similar concerns, noting that some residents may believe the system is a way for the city to generate revenue rather than an effort to improve public safety.

Obvio’s services would be violator-funded, meaning there are no upfront costs, according to city documents. Obvio would collect fees from citation revenue.

Mackie added that doing educational programming about the stop sign cameras in communities would be important to help people understand that it is for public safety.

Maheshwari said Obvio will collaborate with the city to provide residents with necessary educational materials. He emphasized that educating and communicating with residents are top priorities to facilitate larger cultural change.

“Working with us is not about just the cameras and the citations, it’s about this broader movement that you’re creating across town,” Maheshwari said. “We’ll support you with all of the content and materials to deal with that.”

When residents go to pay their citation in Obvio’s portal, they are shown footage of their driving behavior and a video of what good driving behavior looks like, Maheshwari said.

District 3 council member Stuart Adams raised concerns about the volume of violations, noting that residents may be disheartened when they see the high amount of violations reported each day.

Adams clarified with Maheshwari that the number of reported violations does not equate to the number of citations issued.

Once Obvio uploads footage of a violation to its portal, local law enforcement reviews each case to determine which ones meet their criteria for a citation. In reality, the number of citations issued will likely be smaller than the number of violations reported by Obvio, Adams said.

Adams also brought up the idea of having a grace period for the violations, like how speed cameras sometimes allow a few miles over the posted speed limit.

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According to Maheshwari, the technology is completely customizable, and Obvio works with each municipality early on to establish their threshold for what’s considered a violation.

The city should consult the bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee and public safety staff to establish thresholds that balance public safety with avoiding strict citation practices, Adams said.

The council members ultimately decided to extend their conversation to a further date after they have a chance to reach out to their constituents.

But they agreed to have the city attorney begin to align all relevant city ordinances with the camera monitoring system, so they can implement Obvio without legal delays when they are ready to implement it permanently.

According to city manager Kenny Young, once the city signs the contract with Obvio, the implementation will likely be phased. The city will start with a select number of intersections in the first year before expanding to a wider deployment, he said.