Mapping Change When It Matters Most
In a year of dramatic change, CARMERA deployed new technology and forged new partnerships with NYC authorities to help keep maps (and those who rely on them) up-to-date
TL;DR…
- CARMERA was selected as a finalist in the Transit Innovation Partnership’s 2020 Transit Tech Lab, a program that brings leading startups together with New York transit agencies to solve complex problems
- CARMERA showcased real-time event data orders of magnitude more detailed and granular than the major mapping companies
- CARMERA was able to detect COVID-related on-street dining in real time, a first in the HD mapping industry
This horrific year has reminded us all of the heroism of New York’s transit professionals, who work tirelessly to keep our city moving, at great risk to their own safety and while mourning too many colleagues lost to the pandemic. Thank you.
Just before the pandemic hit New York 12 months ago, we began working with New York City Transit as a finalist in the Transit Innovation Partnership’s 2020 Transit Tech Lab — a program that brings together leading startups with public transit authorities from across the New York metropolitan region to help solve some of the area’s most pressing transportation challenges.
This month we briefed New York’s regional transportation agency leaders on CARMERA’s participation in the Transit Tech Lab. These public servants and their teams are turning every stone to ensure that our City infrastructure emerges stronger, more financially sound and resilient. While clear-eyed about the limits of startups to wave a magic wand and navigate us out of the maze of challenges ahead, we are humbled by these leaders’ embrace of startups like CARMERA to assist where we can.
In CARMERA’s case, we can lend a hand by sharing accurate and up-to-date data about the evolving use of public streets as a result of COVID shutdowns.
Last summer, we noticed that our fleet-sourced–camera machine vision technology started detecting a new type of lane closure. The City had just given restaurants permission to set up outdoor dining in parking lanes — and sure enough, that’s what we were picking up. These changes impact navigation in every sense, from route planning to drop-offs, so CARMERA incorporated “On-Street Dining” into our classification and localization stack.
The cutout below shows you results from a section in midtown Manhattan.
These new uses for our streets are almost non-existent in any major mapping platform or road database, including the City’s own.
- 70%: Existing maps missed over 70% of closure events in driving lanes, and 100% of parking lane closures.
- 65%: COVID-driven outdoor dining on streets make up a supermajority of of total closures.
- SF, too: We looked at San Francisco in January ’21 and found that 60% of road closures represent outdoor dining not captured anywhere — including in city records.
The changes that have already come to our streets are consequential for navigation, service delivery, quality of life and beyond — and more are on the way. Mapping and maintaining a public record of the current use of our streetscape is the charge of responsive government.
When I was chief digital officer of the City of New York, I advocated for exactly this kind of partnership between government and tech companies. Startups come equipped with products, points of view, and data that might offer a solution to (or at least help make a dent in) the complex problems that afflict urban transportation. But for all the potential for collaboration, startups are often ill-equipped to serve the government as a client. And within the halls of government, forward looking projects that require staff time take a backseat to the daily task of keeping the trains running on time.
If there were ever a time to take on forward looking projects…
In planning the road ahead, we must consider the many uses for our streets that emerged during the pandemic. Once the snow thaws (!), just look out the window to see how New Yorkers are using public space! A year later, these changes seem to reflect not just pandemic accommodations but a wholesale reconsideration of how we might rather use our urban streetscape. As New Yorkers delight in the opportunities for these changes to endure, we must ensure that this new dynamic and evolved way of maximizing communal space are recorded and accounted for in service delivery — like plow routes that remove snow from new on-street dining openings, designated curb space for small business deliveries, or reimagined bus routes and stop locations. Equally important, this public accounting will also promote community-driven design decisions.
As FoV readers know, CARMERA’s core commercial offering is an HD mapping suite for autonomous vehicles. Our customers — both traditional car makers and newer mobility-as-a-service companies — rely on CARMERA’s maps for intelligence about the road ahead. Our secret sauce is in the technical, business, and operational IP we’ve developed to keep these maps up-to-date with all three legs of the trilemma: higher accuracy, faster speeds, and lower cost.
In the process of building and maintaining our HD maps, we generate data that might be useful to those tasked with running the streets. It’s a set of data exhaust that when I was in City Hall would have been a dream to get a hold of. And it’s why this last year of experimenting with transit policymakers has felt so promising.
As a company founded here in Brooklyn — and one that’s benefited from New York’s incredible transit services — being a part of the Transit Tech Lab has special meaning, offering us the opportunity to use the data we create as part of our core commercial offering to help leaders in the city that is our home. We’re happy to share our lane-level insights with policymakers who share our mission of improving mobility for all, and will do everything possible to support New York City’s just and complete recovery.
We’re excited to map the streets of New York along with the New Yorkers who continue to reimagine them.
