San José’s Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Program: Lessons for Cities
These days, autonomous driving innovations are in the news almost everyday, from changing public transit, to autonomous delivery, to changing the landscape of urban tourism and a growing list of autonomous vehicle companies, it is clear that the private Autonomous Vehicles industry is moving forward, whether local governments are ready or not. Here in San José, we are at the epicenter of the autonomous revolution — with over 250 companies in this industry in Silicon Valley. This proximity offers us a unique opportunity to learn with the industry about how best to usher in these next generation transit solutions. City government is where policy becomes action — the good and the bad become apparent at the local level. It’s literally where “the rubber meets the road”.
In San José, we embrace the technology industry as a key driver of our economy and we work with them to achieve our common goals. But, we also want to ensure that the benefits of rapid technological advancement benefit our whole community. For example, our autonomous vehicle pilot program is designed to create an open dialogue with the industry, but also to benefit the public. As we have progressed, we have received several questions about our process. So, we have decided to help our fellow local government and municipal folks interested in launching their own AV pilots by developing a playbook on our public-private partnership approach. Though there are certainly many ways to launch successful pilots, we wanted to share what has worked for us, as well as highlighting where we encountered (and where others might anticipate) challenges.
Lessons learned
Over the course of launching our first pilot, we confronted a few challenges unique to engaging with this new space and building Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Though there is no silver bullet solution to overcoming these challenges, we hope that the perspective and experience we gained along the way will help anyone launching similar partnerships. Read on to see some challenges we face and our ways we are finding it useful to turn these challenges into opportunities:
Setting reasonable expectations for the technology & educating stakeholders beyond the hype
Level 5 Autonomy is not quite here…yet!
One challenge we face was with setting reasonable expectations as to the current level of the technology. Even Waymo’s Autonomous fleet, which is currently still the most advanced, has trouble with performing driving tasks that humans are very well accustomed to doing everyday and it’s CEO has mentioned that he thinks AVs won’t ever be able to drive fully autonomously in all road conditions. With all the hype around the future possibilities of AVs, it’s important to set reasonable expectations as to where the technology is currently. In San José, our DoT AV manager, Jill North, comes from the industry and understands the technical and operational risks associated with AV pilots. It’s still important to make sure all city hall staff who are involved in the projects are on the same page, so our DoT expert has been a key person in providing both formal and informal information about the state of the technology to the whole team. We at the Mayor’s Office have also organized monthly speaker series aimed at the Council and Mayor Office. Many of these sessions are related to autonomous vehicles, including both an introduction to the technology and deeper dives into subjects, like LiDAR, in order to help the people driving the policy better understand the limitations as well as the possibilities of the technology.
Creating public value through PPPs
As we have mentioned in a previous blog, we believe cities and private partners can work together towards public value creation. By outlining use cases we know are valuable for our residents, we were better able to guide private partners towards pilots that both test innovative technologies and serve the needs of under-served communities. When we released our RFI, we were able to outline some specific use cases around connecting people to their jobs, connecting low income areas to public transit and connecting our airport and train station. By working proactively to set the agenda and specifying what kinds of pilots we want, we have been able to work with our partners to ensure the pilots are working in actually useful ways for our residents.
Building a longer term vision, not just one off pilots
Here in San José, we have a long term vision for building a Smart City. We know that achieving this long term vision requires a commitment to long-term partnerships. Part of a challenge is in helping our private sector partners understand the value of working collaboratively with a city. Cities understand how to work with the public and partnering together can help companies ease product launches of innovative technologies like autonomous vehicles. For example, in San José, we have worked lockstep with our partners and agreed to share an open API of connected traffic signal data with them, as well as connect the Police and Fire Departments and our partners to co-develop a safety protocol and work together collaboratively in preparation of launching our pilot. Although this takes longer in the short term, it eases implementation in the longer term. Sometimes, you have to move slowly in order to move faster later. As we refine our partnership approach, we will move towards finding innovative solutions to sharing and pricing curb space and further leading the conversation on how to safely deploy and manage new technology on our streets. By working together with the private sector, we hope to ensure our collaborations are for the long term.
We hope that this guide is helpful to anyone working with local or city governments in their trek to launch their own autonomous vehicle pilots. As we advance and build on our first pilot with Daimler Bosch, we want to be sure we are sharing our practices with the committed community around us who also are looking towards preparing and innovating for Smarter Cities. We hope this guide is useful for any city embarking on an autonomous vehicle program.
For more information about our ongoing efforts, including our work with AVs, please see our website: San José MOTI. For a more thorough description of our process, please see: A Playbook for Multi-Sector Innovation: San José and Autonomous Vehicle Pilots, prepared by Ravindra Mistri and Noah Sheinbaum through Stanford Impact Labs in 2017. And for our most recent updates, follow us on Instagram and Twitter @sanjosemoti!
