Transportation

The Success Of Autonomous Vehicles Hinges On Smart Cities. Inrix Is Making It Easier To Build Them.


Signs are an effective way to communicate with a human driver, but self-driving vehicles? Not so much. A can of spray paint or black tape is all you need to trick some AVs into driving the wrong speed limit (that really happened). What’s needed is a way to communicate official parking rules, speed limits, and legitimate traffic variances, and right now there isn’t an easy way to explain to self-driving cars that “alternative side of the street parking” is in effect because of a parade. But Inrix has developed a new platform to make easy for cities to do that.

Raising traffic IQ

Today Inrix’s announced it released IQ, a software-as-a-service solution that houses multiple location analytics applications in a single platform. It’s a one-stop-shop for transportation data analysis, visualization, and insights; an integrated solutions-oriented platform that enables enterprises and transportation officials to know what happened or what’s happening with mobility in their areas. And it’s not just for traffic data geeks.

Many cities already use Inrix for traffic analysis, but with IQ, the Kirkland, Wash.-based company has democratized access to the advanced technology that data scientists use to calculate pretty much anything that has to do with transportation. It makes it easier for a new or existing customer to find answers rather than issue a complex RFP process every time they want to know why there are bottlenecks on the I-5.

Five Guys can use it to find the perfect location for their next restaurant, and finance groups can figure out if the economy in Portugal has recovered from Covid-19 restrictions based on long-haul fleet traffic. It offers a 14-day free trial, doesn’t require that customers to know SQL, and has flexible payment options so that, more or less, anyone with a legitimate business need and a credit card could afford it. It also bubbles up to the surface a product that can expedite autonomous vehicles’ integration with today’s urban landscape.

Helping self-driving vehicles learn the rules of the road

Road Rules is a product that Inrix developed a few years ago to fill the need for a digitized version of a city’s rules and restrictions of its roads. Municipalities were trying to work with autonomous vehicle operators to provide this information, but AV companies typically had to build from scratch their own map of official speed limits, cross walks, school zones, public right of way at intersections, and dozens of other traffic nuances a human driver takes for granted.

“Initially, this came out of a project with the city of Boston and a handful of autonomous vehicle operators who were were struggling to deliver an understanding of what the rules and restrictions for the roadway were within their existing mapping process,” says Avery Ash, Head of Autonomous Mobility at Inrix.

The solution Inrix, which was spun out of Microsoft
MSFT
in 2005, ended up creating gives transportation officials the ability to digitize their transportation infrastructure down to the granular level of no-parking zones in front of fire hydrants. Now they’re able to maintain this information as needed and share it with other groups, such as companies that help drivers find open parking spaces or with car-hailing services to communicate where the permitted passenger drop off or pick up zones are located and what the loading zone hours are.

“One of the reasons why cities are choosing to use Road Rules is it allows all this data to be managed in one central location. We were partnered with Shared Streets, which is a project, our project of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, to create an open format for sharing this data so anybody can use this information,” says Ash as he demonstrates Road Rules and highlights areas still in need of approval in Santa Monica. The company says it’s in a constant cycle of regression to keep maps—especially parking information, which is another revenue stream for the company—fresh and to heal any data gaps.

A crowded transportation data marketplace

However, there is no shortage of companies trying to map the world. Google has been trying to map every public street for years. Navigation companies such as TomTom and HERE have partnerships with automotive manufacturers that enable them to scan roads and create very accurate and detailed 3D maps that are continuously updated.

That said, there is a shortage of first-party data necessary to ensure the rules of these roads they digitize are validated and up-to-date. Companies such as Waze, HERE, and Apple
AAPL
do a very good job of updating street changes. But they rely on third-parties or machine learning to annotate maps, or don’t offer a product for cities to manage and control their own data.

Road Rules differentiates itself with an interface that enables cities update traffic changes and share it as needed. After the data has been published by the city on Road Rules, it becomes available in an open API.

But Inrix’s IQ goes beyond just helping self-driving cars learn the rules of the road—it’s integral to planning smart cities of the future.

Democratizing access to transportation and location data

At the heart of any community are people and how and where they interact, and anticipating their movements is key to building the right services in the right places.

Urban planners and transportation departments of large cities have the funds and the resources to gather and analyze data from disparate sources necessary to find traffic solutions or plan for the future. But smaller towns don’t have that luxury. To level the playing field, access to this data through a self-service platform such as IQ gives Birmingham, Alabama the same tools and analysis garnered by New York City’s robust staff of technologists and data scientists.

To appreciate the impact IQ could have on urban development, you have to understand “the old way of doing things.” Despite the advanced computing and tools that reportedly make it easier to visualize data and find answers, when it comes to transportation-related data analysis, manually compiled Excel spreadsheets still play a large role in the process.

City planners have to compile map data, demographic data, parking data, and traffic data into a single platform—and that’s before they layer on weather information and several other factors they consider. Then they need to hire a team of programmers, data scientists, and IT personnel to build a proprietary solution. Or they could hire one of many companies like Inrix to do it for them.

What Inrix is trying to do with IQ is remove the barriers to accessing and using the information that already exists and, ultimately, end the dependency on tedious Excel spreadsheets.

“Very few cities and states have the technical ability to take data and data science to put it together to build these applications,” says Inrix CEO Bryan Mistele. He lists the numerous sprawling cities and small towns that use their products, which spans 120 countries globally.

Although the public sector makes up the largest portion of Inrix’s customer base, major companies such as IBM
IBM
, ClearChannel, and Windemere also leverage transportation data to help them make business decisions and products. With IQ, Mistele says Inrix will be able to quickly work down the enterprise food chain, opening the door for smaller or mid-sized customers to access these tools.

Smart cities are a trillion-dollar opportunity

How big of a market potential a platform like IQ has to offer is hard to quantify. Mistele estimates that the “smart cities” industry at $100 billion to $1 trillion—while many analysts say it’s even higher. But it depends on what you’re counting.

“We certainly believe this is about a hundred billion dollar plus market just for data and location analytics to enterprise and public sector customers,” says Mistele.

The company doesn’t typically share annual revenue, but provided a range of $75 million to $100 million, with a 30% cumulative average growth rate over the past three years. Mistele says he expects the company to grow at a similar rate for the next three years. With an existing customer base of hundreds of customers that will migrate to the new platform over the next week, the sky’s the limit—the potential uses for the platform is seemingly endless.

“Google” for the car

But they have far from cornered the transportation data market. There are multiple competitors for many parts of their applications, and some of these competitors are current partners. However, they may be the first to tie it all together with an easy-to-use visual interface for accessing their data.

“One thing I like about it is that there’s a product there. It’s not like data sales—they’re selling a product,” says Gartner
IT
smart mobility analyst Michael Ramsey. “They’ve liberated the silos of data they monitor and created a visual data marketplace.”

By standardizing data points from vehicles and making it easily accessible with low coding knowledge, Inrix has essentially built a “Google for the car.” Easily queryable data means that previously hidden information is unleashed, and businesses are able to wring insight out of things that used to be inscrutable.

“You can start to make really big changes quickly,” says Ramsey.

But he also points out that there are a lot of data marketplaces out there. General Motors
GM
, Amazon AWS
AMZN
, and Google
GOOG
provide competitive services to varying degrees, and some have richer data sets because they can access behavioral information from inside the vehicle, such as preferred radio stations.

“There’s probably not going to be a limitless number of data points that that BMW will want to give up. They’re not going to let outsiders to be able to create a perfect profile of BMW drivers,” says Ramsey, and notes that companies such as General Motors and Google can.

But Inrix’s value proposition isn’t about building a more accurate demographics profile for targeted marketing—it’s about creating a platform to help smaller communities and businesses down the path to becoming a “smart city.” Accessing transportation data in a highly visual and solutions-oriented portal can help them do that. At the same time, Ramsey points out that it would take very little for competitors to provide a similar interface, which HERE has done with its Workshop platform. After all, Inrix only began working on IQ in April.

That’s where Inrix’s vast partnerships with municipalities is an advantage.

“They’re on the purchasing approval list. They’ve already dealt with them to do traffic counting and congestion management,” says Ramsey. “Governments trust them.”

As urban centers develop and grow, they’ll likely tap a data-agnostic company such as Inrix. But whichever vendor they choose, they’ll need a data management platform to communicate with connected vehicles, infrastructure, and IoT devices to help them make cities “smarter” and roads safer and less congested in the future.



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