Waymo, the self-driving car company, and Waze, the satellite navigation software owned by Alphabet, are partnering with five cities to map and help fill potholes. Atlanta joins Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin in the pilot.
The partnership combines Waymo's "perception and physical feedback systems" with Waze's routing data to identify where potholes exist across each city. Both companies are Alphabet subsidiaries.
The City of Atlanta Department of Transportation's latest publicly shared data reports that nearly 4,000 potholes were repaired in 2021. Residents currently report potholes through Atlanta's ATL311 service portal, and fixes are handled by the "Pothole Posse," a repair program that launched under Mayor Shirley Franklin in the early 2000s. Five two-person teams can fill up to 150 potholes a day, according to an 11Alive interview cited by city officials.
"This constituent-driven model of road maintenance has limits," Waymo said in the release. The pilot aims to give cities a fuller, passively generated map rather than relying solely on 311 calls to surface every problem.
For Atlanta drivers, the immediate benefit is less obvious than the infrastructure shift underneath: city engineers should be able to prioritize repairs based on data from cars that already drive these streets daily.
