Transportation
Google Street View Can Reveal How Your Neighborhood Votes
You can learn a lot about an area just from the cars parked on its streets.
If you walk through a city and see more pickup trucks than sedans parked on the side of the road, there’s a good chance most residents there vote Republican. This sounds like just another stereotype—that Republicans cruise around in pickups while Democrats prefer the Toyota Prius. But maybe there’s some truth to it after all.
That’s what a team of artificial intelligence researchers at Stanford University have found from their efforts to predict demographics and voting patterns based solely on Google Street View images of cars.