Nearly 150 stoplights in San Jose, California, are equipped with an artificial intelligence tool aimed at optimizing bus trips. The tech has allowed the buses to run at higher speeds and reduced commute times for riders by 20%, in part by making it more likely buses will reach a green traffic light.
“We know that what meaningfully drives up ridership levels is the frequency of the service, how often the buses come, and the speed of getting to your destination,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, noting the program will now be scaled citywide. “A more than 20% improvement in commute times is a big deal.”
Mahan sees the signal priority technology as one of San Jose’s most successful AI implementation efforts to date. The Silicon Valley city is trying to vastly expand its use of the technology in city hall and across government, Mahan said. It’s part of his administration’s broader push to make the city a hub for using AI tools in government, and a destination for AI companies and talent.
The city is one of a number of places exploring such initiatives. But San Jose is the founding member of the GovAI Coalition, which includes hundreds of government entities across the US that share information about AI-related projects, safeguards and rules, and procurements. The city has offered up to $50,000 in incentives for early-stage AI startups that relocated there. It’s also rolling out an AI upskilling course for city workers in collaboration with San Jose State University to teach them how to better use the technology.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you talk to me a bit about the city’s AI ambitions?
We want to be the most AI-enabled city hall in the country, and we started on this journey before we even really knew what AI was. If you go back about eight, nine years ago, we were starting to look at public safety technologies and realized that there are privacy issues that we need to work on. (The city has used license plate reader technology for nearly two decades, and developed a use policy for the technology in 2017.) And so we really started focusing on data privacy and data security related to applications that had nothing to do with AI, but it gave us the muscle.
So that was the beginning. About two years ago, we invited some other cities to join us on a very informal monthly Zoom call to just talk about artificial intelligence because it was starting to emerge as essentially a trend. And that blossomed into this platform called the GovAI Coalition, which we host on our city website. And we now convene with partners from over 700 public agencies around the country.
What are some of the projects you’re working on?
We’ve driven some of the leading pilots on object detection. So on roadways, we put sensors on city vehicles. We can very accurately identify emerging potholes, graffiti, illegal dumping, street lights that are out, lived-in vehicles, and a number of streetscape issues where we can automate reporting.
Language translation — we actually have the largest Vietnamese population of any city outside of Vietnam in San Jose. So we have a lot of training data that’s native to our city based on our population. We took our training data in Vietnamese, plugged it into Google’s base model for Google Translate, and actually have improved by 8% translation of government websites and government documents into Vietnamese.
How are you thinking about privacy, especially around law enforcement technologies?
There’s been growing skepticism, if not cynicism, that the technology sector wants to own our data to monetize it, even if it’s not in our interest. And so I guess we just culturally felt that if we’re going to bring best-in-class technologies and tools into city hall, we can’t fall into that trap.
Government can’t afford that kind of violation of trust. A startup can fail. Government really can’t. So we felt that getting that piece right was really important. And I shouldn’t say it that way. There is no getting it right. It’s about ongoing dialogue and transparency.
We’re rolling out — and this is not a novel technology — red light and speed safety cameras, which there have been some limitations on in California. We’re a pilot city in the state to start rolling out more of what some might consider aggressive surveillance and enforcement tools around traffic safety. We have a Vision Zero plan. We’re trying to make our roads safer, but we have taken the time to get it right. We’re going around to different neighborhoods and having community meetings and, for example, assuring people that we’re not doing facial recognition, assuring people that we’re going to equitably distribute these.
If you don’t answer thoughtfully and engage people and create a forum for them to ask those hard questions, I think you can really risk creating cynicism and making it harder in the long run to get things done.
When it comes to the economy, San Jose is a tech and AI hub already. A new Brookings Institution report dubbed San Jose and San Francisco AI “superstars” among US jurisdictions, finding that the two metro areas around these cities have excelled in adoption, talent concentration and innovation.
City government is piloting all of these initiatives and at the same time creating new incentives for startups and other new entrants. Is there a point where it could be too much of one industry?
I do worry a little bit about diversification. At the same time, we’re one of the few big cities in the country that still has a meaningful manufacturing base. So while San Francisco has gotten a lot of headlines around AI related to software applications, we’re really still a hardware town in a lot of ways. So we do robotics, we do vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, batteries. Our history was really in semiconductors.
I’m trying to think about how we leverage the fact that we’re still a city that makes things — almost one in five workers in our city is in manufacturing— and continue to be a city of economic mobility. And so our challenge is to make sure that we continue to say yes to manufacturing.
We have this incredible asset in San Jose State University. It’s like the pipeline for young diverse talent in the South Bay. We’ve never had an intentional strategy for helping those graduates start companies and stay local. And so one of my major initiatives is to create a startup cluster in downtown San Jose adjacent to the university so that we can keep more of that young talent there actually build their own economic future. That’s the thing we’re excited about.
