Municipal leaders looking for insights into critical safety data can now access that information for free through Samsara. The technology company has launched Samsara City Insights and is making the data available at no cost to government leaders.
“As Samsara has grown over the past few years, so has the scale, volume and complexity of our data. Our IoT platform gathers 1.6 trillion sensor data points from over half a million vehicles on a yearly basis (that’s 3 million data points per minute). This data touches every aspect of our fleets’ operations — from vehicle speeds and miles driven to fuel efficiency, engine idling, harsh braking, distracted driving and much more,” Ali Akhtar, director of data science for Samsara, wrote in a blog posting announcing the initiative Tuesday morning.
City Insights collects data from over 15,000 commercial fleets across Samsara’s customer base, aggregates and anonymizes the data and turns it into useful information for governments. Among the data available are speed and harsh events, including braking, crashes and acceleration. The City Insights data set includes data from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York City. Additional cities will be added soon, the company said.
The company said that as smart city technology grows increasingly prevalent, the amount of data generated grows exponentially. Much of that data, though, remains siloed, “making it difficult to gain proper insights to inform initiatives serving your citizens, the environment and public safety.”
Cities around the world — including Samsara customers Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Boston — are announcing Vision Zero initiatives to reduce traffic-related injuries and fatalities. Collecting the siloed data and making it available to city leaders can help them make more informed decisions on safety initiatives, Akhtar wrote.
“From speaking with our customers, it’s evident that cities use a wide range of tools to analyze data. City Insights gives you the flexibility to access data in a variety of ways,” he wrote.
City Insights provides data at both the street and neighborhood levels. According to Akhtar, planners can use this granular level of data to identify troubling patterns, such as a high number of harsh braking events, that could result in targeted outreach programs to businesses and community members on safe driving practices.
The data can be downloaded and layered on top of existing data to provide more context on events in a particular area.
“You can analyze our mobility data with your own tools to get detailed insights. For example, layer data on top of accident reports to corroborate the location of hazard zones or cross-reference harsh event hotspots with KSI (killed or seriously injured) data,” Akhtar wrote.
Interested government leaders can email Samsara at data@samsara.com for more information or subscribe to Samsara Data Insights to receive emailed reports.
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