Building safe and resilient transportation with AI

What does transportation mean to you? For some, it’s making sure the train is on schedule so they can get to work on time. Maybe it’s making sure you have time connecting between flights. Maybe it’s about a stress-free commute. For others it’s the pleasure of walking around our cities or biking on trails. We all have our own individual transportation story, and for the thousands of transportation agencies and the millions of people working in the transportation sector, their key mission is safety. We believe AI can fundamentally advance ‘Vision Zero’ – a goal to reduce fatalities in transportation, build and maintain resilient systems, connect people, while also planning for the future.

Building the blueprint for safe, resilient, and efficient transportation systems

From moving millions of commuters across a city or deploying critical supplies, Google is committed to being the partner that helps people move faster, safer, and more efficiently. Google’s investments in transportation include expanding its cloud solutions and developing new data and models to ‘see’ the world. Some of our latest transportation innovations include:

• Road Management Insights (RMI): Google Maps now provides high-accuracy travel time, speed, disruption, and vehicle count data across road networks without the need for physical sensors. By leveraging RMI travel time data, agencies can identify incidents before the first emergency services call, analyze long-term congestion trends, improve urban planning, and identify safety hotspots and crash-prone areas.
• Mobility AI Traffic Simulation API: Coming from Google Research, Mobility AI provides a powerful digital twin to help agencies visualize the future of their road networks. In this virtual environment, city planners can “test drive” infrastructure changes before a single cone is placed on the road. Whether it is Seattle optimizing traffic routes during major events or agencies proactively visualizing new bike lanes and road infrastructure to seek public feedback, watch how cities are using these simulations to build more efficient and resilient communities.
• Preventing crashes before they happen: By combining AI simulations, machine learning models, advanced models, and RMI data, states like California and Hawaii are able to detect where crashes would take place before they even happen, which can help save lives.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with three leading voices in transportation – Carlos Braceras, Executive Director, Utah Department of Transportation (DOT), Toks Omishakin, Secretary, California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA), and Anant Dinamani, Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP. Together. We discussed ideas for building resilient transportation systems with AI and shared our blueprint for building safe, resilient, and efficient transportation systems of the future. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation.

The ultimate goal: Saving lives

The single most important goal for any transportation agency – safety. With roadway fatalities remaining high, the shift from reactive to proactive safety measures is paramount. Secretary Toks Omishakin of CalSTA highlighted California’s Roadway Safety Insights (RSI) tool, developed with Deloitte and Google Cloud. By integrating over 30 different datasets, RSI condenses weeks of analysis into minutes. The goal is to move beyond fixing intersections after crashes occur to predicting and mitigating risks before they happen.

Leveraging technology for safe and seamless journeys

Carlos Braceras of Utah DOT shared that he’s thinking about how we create the journey that people want to take – allowing people to go where they want, when they want and how they want – and doing it safely. He underscored the focus on saving lives and making people’s lives better. From our conversation, it’s clear that we’re at an inflection point in terms of the ability to make better and faster decisions, and build trust. Carlos emphasized that technology, including AI, is the crucial enabler here.

Getting your data ready for AI

This biggest challenge facing transportation agencies is siloed and fragmented data. According to Anant Dinamani of Deloitte Consulting LLP, we’re at an inflection point – and the future is about integration. Agencies must rethink how they manage their data, and take a foundational step to create a single source of truth—this is essential to maximize the value of AI and agents. Anant stressed that progress will stall if we don’t anchor everything on trusted data—understanding its origin, identifying potential bias, and ensuring secure integration – this is the key to realizing the full potential of AI.

Let’s build the future together

Register to attend our Best of Next Public Sector Webinar for a deep dive into the Next sessions and announcements that matter most to the public sector. Join us at ITS America in Detroit from June 9-12, where our experts will be on the ground to provide live demos and discuss how Google’s AI-powered solutions can help build transportation systems of the future, right now.