How Cities Can Act on Pothole Detection Data: Waymo Data, Way More Opportunities

How Cities Can Act on Pothole Detection Data: Waymo Data, Way More Opportunities

Waymo and Waze recently announced a pilot program that will make pothole detection data available to cities and state DOTs. As Waymo's autonomous fleet travels through five metro areas, its onboard perception systems automatically identify potholes and feed that information to participating jurisdictions.

It's a compelling idea, and one that points to a larger shift in how infrastructure data gets collected. For decades, cities have depended on 311 calls and manual inspections to know where their roads are deteriorating. That model works, but it's incomplete by design — it only captures what residents happen to notice and report, leaving large stretches of roadway unmonitored between inventory cycles.

Autonomous vehicle fleets change that equation. A vehicle that's already traversing city streets can effectively double as a continuous sensing platform, identifying surface conditions in real time without any additional effort from agency staff. That kind of passive, always-on data collection is genuinely new.

But collecting better data is only half the challenge.

The Data Bottleneck

Once cities receive pothole datasets from Waymo — or any new data source — they still face a hard problem: what do you actually do with it?

The traditional workflow is manual and fragmented. Communities typically face two options: hire a consultant to process the data and produce recommendations, or ask their internal GIS team to work through it. Either way, it's time-intensive and rarely produces a long-term strategy. Once the analysis is done, there's no systematic way to update it as new data arrives or as conditions change.

The result is that better data doesn't automatically lead to better decisions. It leads to better information sitting in a spreadsheet or a consultant's final report — disconnected from the capital planning process, maintenance schedules, and the infrastructure investment decisions that actually matter.

Building Systems Ready for New Data

This is where Citian's ADAPT platform comes in. ADAPT is an asset management platform built specifically for transportation and city leadership to make better decisions about their roadway and infrastructure. Unlike traditional GIS workflows or consultant-driven analysis, ADAPT runs on autopilot — automatically ingesting datasets from the roadway and right-of-way as they become available and integrating them into an ongoing maintenance and capital planning process.

When new technology generates new data, ADAPT is already running. The platform automatically ingests incoming datasets on an ongoing basis, contextualizes them against existing conditions, and translates them into actionable infrastructure recommendations. More importantly, it builds those recommendations into a strategy — one that can be updated as new data arrives, defended to elected officials and the public, and executed through capital programs and maintenance schedules.

For communities receiving pothole data from Waymo, the difference is significant. Instead of managing that data as a one-time project or consultant engagement, ADAPT treats it as part of a continuous infrastructure management system. Pothole locations feed into priority networks. Networks inform investment decisions. Decisions get tracked and updated over time.

Turning Data Into Durable Decisions

The Waymo announcement is a useful signal for transportation agencies thinking about their data strategy. Richer data sources are coming — some through commercial partnerships, some through federal programs, some through new sensing technologies embedded in the infrastructure itself. The agencies positioned to benefit most will be the ones that have already built the systems and workflows to translate incoming data into defensible, timely decisions.

Data is getting better. The infrastructure management system needs to keep up.