The UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies is now home to the most comprehensive longitudinal public dataset tracking global Autonomous Vehicle deployments. AVMap.io places ITS Berkeley as the leading academic source on how autonomous vehicles are changing cities.
AVMap.io creator Jackson Lester was at a career crossroads and didn’t want his carefully curated open-source dataset (av-map-data on GitHub) to fade away, so he gifted ownership to ITS Berkeley to ensure its continued growth and utility for the academic community.
"AVs have the potential to make car-dependent communities, like Lexington, Kentucky where I grew up, livable, even dignified, without owning a car,” says Lester. “In 30 years, I think owning a car will be more like owning a boat or a plane. This will be the biggest shift in our transportation system in generations, as big as horses to cars."
Recognizing the need for a central hub for the public and researchers alike to deposit, find, and use publicly available autonomous vehicle deployment data, Lester created the platform and wrote custom code to aggregate that information into a streamlined interface where no private or proprietary data is involved.
"I kept thinking about what it would look like if you pressed play on the history of AV deployment. Like a time-lapse of a petri dish, you'd see service areas bloom across dozens of cities worldwide,” says Lester. “I couldn't find anything that captured that, so I built it. The underlying dataset is open source, which is the real contribution. As far as I can tell, it's the most comprehensive longitudinal public record of how AV services have expanded and changed since 2017. You can't study what you can't measure, and this data will be critical in studying how AVs impact transportation safety, demographic patterns, transportation mode choice, and more."
The gift includes the web application, an open-source data repository, supporting cloud infrastructure accounts (Supabase, Netlify, Mapbox), the avmap.io domain, and associated social media accounts. Lester said he chose ITS Berkeley as the next steward due to its credibility, the student talent pipeline, and how maintaining the most comprehensive dataset on AV deployment positions ITS as a leader in the space as the industry scales.
“We are very excited to receive this project,” says Justin Wiley, Strategy and Development Director at ITS Berkeley. “We believe this tool will be of significant interest to our faculty and students within ITS, providing a ready-made platform for analyzing AV trends and data sets.”
Data Science undergraduate student Shlok Sooch, a two-time American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Scholar, will take over management of the program.
“My passion has always been at the intersection of tech and transit,” says Sooch. “I want to thank Jackson Lester for his incredible vision in creating this platform. It’s an honor to take the baton as the new Product Lead.”
Sooch added his goal is to make AV Map the gold-standard resource for researchers, policy-makers, and enthusiasts alike.
Check out AVMap.io