Digital recreations make it easier for city planners to envision potential projects that could ultimately facilitate safer street conditions, Zach said during the Route Fifty Future Cities summit. Dall-E is a machine learning model developed by research lab OpenAI that can produce realistic cityscapes from text and image prompts. While renditions may not look as realistic as professional designs, the rapid pace of AI advances may enable Dall-E to catch up to professional planners, he said.

Dall-E can realize an image in 20 minutes for a dollar or two, reducing the cost and time it would take for staff to do the same job, Katz said in an email. Officials from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and New York have requested AI transformations of city streets, he said.