No longer will road maintenance crews in Boston need to depend exclusively on calls to 311, the city’s non-emergency phone line, because Mercedes announced today that data gathered by its vehicles’ suspension systems will be used to help identify potholes, unevenness, and other road hazards.
As part of a pilot program exploring vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in Mercedes vehicles, Boston will have access to anonymized data showing where hot spots of suspension action happen throughout the city.
“This partnership with The City of Boston aims to offer a deeper understanding of the infrastructure in which vehicles operate by securely gathering, processing, and visualizing anonymized vehicle data,” said Dimitris Psillakis, CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA. “The sophisticated systems in our vehicles can provide valuable insights regarding what is happening along roadways.”
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That data will then be used to inform city officially about areas where improvements are necessary. Although the city already receives plenty of street reports from citizens through 311, it says that Mercedes’ data will still be useful.
“It is well known that not all neighborhoods and communities use Boston 311 at the same rate, yet 311 is a major driver of how some City resources are allocated,” said Stefanie Costa Leabo, the City of Boston’s Chief Data Officer. “We are always eager to find ways to mitigate this bias in reporting, and are excited to evaluate whether by testing new technologies or incorporating these new data we can identify cases that otherwise would have gone unreported and unaddressed in order to distribute city resources more equitably.”
Whether data from Mercedes’s highly advanced luxury vehicles will help create a more equitable system remains to be seen, but this isn’t the first time the city has explored similar technology. Boston previously experimented with using accelerometer and GPS data from smartphones to identify road defects. Through that, it discovered that sunken utility covers were one of the biggest causes of sudden bumps in the city.
Although Boston will be the first city in North America to benefit from Mercedes’ data, the automaker has already shared it with a number of European governments.
