How will driverless cars safely navigate the roads of all American cities, avoiding crashes and injuries, where sensors have never been and for which telematics data are not robust?
Answering this fundamental question is essential for widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles and also very valuable for that industry – including car manufacturers, carsharing companies, and shipping and delivery companies – to limit liability, fines, and high insurance costs.
A solution to the AV industry’s greatest challenges is sitting in its blindspot. The key is city administrative data, including crash reports and moving violation citations from police and signage and curb infrastructure data from transportation agencies.
City data will become a cornerstone of the risk-management and deployment strategies of autonomous vehicles, and here’s why:
1. City data helps deploy AVs more places quickly and safely
Having city data, where there are no sensors, makes it possible to anticipate risks, crashes, and congestion before any autonomous vehicles hit the road. City data are typically available and often open, which allows for safety simulations and widespread, simultaneous deployment of vehicles into new markets without expensive, time consuming, and fragmented sensor testing.
2. City data enhances vehicle onboard safety features and saves lives
Onboard sensor technologies in autonomous vehicles lack the human intuition to slow down in school zones or intersections that are known to be unsafe. Programming vehicles with knowledge of vulnerable populations and crash predictions will help vehicles know where people are or are likely to be, without having to observe them. It will supplement sensors so that vehicles are not only relying on reactionary sensors to accurately see and quickly respond to obstacles or children running into the road.
It is possible to save tens of thousands of lives each year by introducing city data into AVs. With city data, AVs will likely be able to:
- Stop without the presence of physical stop signs
- Drive the speed limit without reading signage
- Always legally park, away from fire hydrants
- Sensitize sensors in school zones
- Drive only on plowed roads
- Reroute to clear the way for emergency vehicles
- Drop passengers or packages at locations without blindspots
3. City data can prevent congestion and lower costs
Instead of waiting for cars to report slow downs, vehicles will leverage real-time-emergency vehicle-response data and event and construction permits to know where and when congestion will occur before cars begin to pileup. For shipment and delivery companies in particular, this has the potential to further optimize routes for on-time delivery and gasoline savings.
While city data are free, they are not always available or organized to be useful. At Open Data Nation, we built Hopper, a data-transmission architecture and machine-learning logic for autonomous vehicles to leverage open data.
With this, we’re hoping to help connect city data to fleet-management, insurance, and risk-management data. We’re looking for cities to participate in a multi-city pilot. To participate, tell us about your city or data from your fleet here.
A similar version of this article was originally published at Open Data Nation.
Photo of Open Data Day at the World Bank in 2015 by M.V. Jantzen/Flickr.