How often do drivers nearly hit a pedestrian at the chaotic Penn-North intersection in West Baltimore, and how does it almost happen each time? Are people walking into the road when they shouldn’t? Are drivers impatiently swerving around others into the bus lane?

Officials soon hope to answer those questions, and a host of others, thanks to pricey new tech.

The West North Avenue Development Authority is spending nearly $400,000 to install LiDAR — think radar but different — at five intersections along a 2.5-mile stretch of West North Avenue between Interstate 83 and its western terminus.

The devices from tech company Iteris will measure changes in light to determine how vehicles and people move at each intersection, pumping out data that analysts can use to suggest safety modifications or ways to improve traffic flow. The devices can distinguish among cars, trucks, buses, people and more, giving analysts robust data, but they aren’t cameras, minimizing privacy concerns.

The devices will be installed where West North Avenue intersects West Mount Royal Avenue, McCulloh Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, North Fulton Avenue and Bloomingdale Road by the end of January, a development authority official said.

Two “smart” intersections in Northeast Baltimore have similar setups thanks to researchers at Morgan State University, but West North Avenue is the first major corridor in the city where planners are deploying the tech at a wider scale. Officials and researchers believe it will lead to big safety improvements in the corridor and could motivate the Baltimore City Department of Transportation to try the tech out citywide.

Erich Lange, who heads the authority’s transportation initiatives, toured Morgan State’s two setups where Hillen Road intersects with Argonne Drive and 33rd Street, and where researchers at the university’s National Transportation Center use LiDAR to study how to make the intersections safer and one day send real-time messages to drivers. He wanted in.

“Instantly I saw the benefits of this,” Lange said. “West North Avenue has so many traffic problems ... so this is a tool to help us really understand what’s happening in real time.”

The entire North Avenue corridor, which stretches from Leakin Park in the west to Baltimore Cemetery in the east, is an area of “particular concern” in the city’s highway safety plan because of its high crash rate.

The city and the Maryland Transit Administration converted a travel lane in each direction into a dedicated bus lane along most of the corridor a couple of years ago. It was meant to speed up bus service and reduce aggressive driving and speeding by narrowing the road for cars and trucks. Lange called it a “great start” toward making the corridor safer, though he acknowledged the initiative has faced mixed reviews from community members, some of whom feel it added to congestion.

“The perception depends on the predominant mode of travel of the person I talk to,” Lange wrote in an email.

Bus riders like it because they think it sped up their commutes, he said, while drivers think it slowed theirs down.

In an email, an MTA official said that bus on-time performance along the corridor has improved 8% on weekdays and Saturdays since the bus lanes were installed and roughly 6.5% on Sundays. They’ve worked with city transportation officials to get transit signal priority — think making a light turn green faster because a bus is coming — on several corridors, including North Avenue. Lange thinks LiDAR may help with that.

A city transportation department official did not respond to questions regarding updated congestion and crash data for the corridor.

Speeding up bus service is just one of many possible uses for this technology, said Brandy Savarese, former associate director at Morgan State’s National Transportation Center. She said the center will serve as the “warehouse” for all the LiDAR data that researchers can analyze.

“This is going to be the real data that supports the anecdotes that we all know, and then what’s it going to take to get the resolution in place,” Savarese said.

In particular, researchers will home in on near collisions involving pedestrians, bikes and cars, an important data point that crash reports can’t show. They’ll also quantify how many drivers run red lights.

The development authority could use that data to show the city transportation department why an intersection needs bigger sidewalks, where a better spot for a bus stop might be or a better timing pattern for traffic lights, wrote Mansoureh Jeihani, director of Morgan State’s National Transportation Center, in an email. The LiDAR systems also could send real-time messages to newer “connected” vehicles to warn about a stalled car or jaywalkers.

But it also can have implications for economic development, which Lange and his colleagues at the development authority are eyeing with interest. For example, the LiDAR could show how many pedestrians walk past a street corner or get off the bus there at different times of the day, which they could use to pitch developers or people considering opening a business.

But, if the development authority succeeds in transforming the aging corridor with transit-oriented projects and other new activity, West North Avenue could hum with even more car horns and frustrated drivers. Lange knows it. He thinks the solution will be better transit service along the corridor, where, according to the MTA, less than half of households have reliable access to a car.

The LiDAR-based smart intersections could be part of helping the authority eventually justify that; officials may not even know what all they can learn from it yet, Lange said.

“I think it’s something that, once it’s up and running, we’ll nerd out on a bit,” he said.