Marking a significant milestone in the City’s efforts to create a safe, equitable and affordable autonomous vehicle (AV) program in Sacramento, the City has partnered with Safety Pool, a new project focused on improving self-driving data and mapping.
Unveiled earlier this year , Safety Pool creates one central location that collects autonomous vehicle data to share among major stakeholders of self-driving technologies.
“The City of Sacramento is excited to be the first government agency to partner with Safety Pool to improve the development of safer autonomous vehicles and establish a consensus on operational safety,” said Louis Stewart, the City’s chief innovation officer. “By partnering with Safety Pool cities can inform regulatory best practices and enable faster adoption of safe autonomous technologies.”
Safety Pool is an initiative of Deepen AI, which the City partnered with in early 2019 to establish mapping routes for autonomous vehicles.
Currently, companies create their own proprietary data for AVs, and the result is a lot of duplication of effort and lack of standards. Safety Pool’s goal is to establish a single, authoritative database of driving scenarios that can be used by and shared among all autonomous vehicle operators. Safety Pool incentivizes AV companies to share data to decrease costs and increase safety.
By partnering with Safety Pool, the City of Sacramento is taking a lead role in defining standards and operating procedures to ensure a safe autonomous vehicle program, Stewart said. By ensuring similar minimum requirements for safety and best practices for compliance with regulatory guidelines, cities can enable faster adoption of safe autonomous technologies.
The City launched the Autonomous Transportation Open Standards LAB (ATOS) in 2017 to make it a testing ground for future urban mobility from both a technology and policy perspective. In conjunction with the California Mobility Center, ATOS is working to create a regulatory environment to make it easy for companies to test their products in Sacramento.
By supporting emerging technologies, the City is working to bring new and innovative companies, infrastructure and jobs to the region.