“If this technology is going to yield benefits for the consumer, we want to make sure it works in the city of Boston,” said Chris Osgood, the city’s chief of streets. “We want to make sure we’re doing our due diligence and understanding what the implications are. How do we set up the right policies and take the right approach to this so it’s going to have the biggest net benefit?”
The partnership with the Switzerland-based WEF, which will be formally announced today, will lead to a yearlong collaboration aimed at studying and implementing tests and policies for self-driving cars. That includes putting autonomous vehicles on the streets of Boston soon, the city said.
“We are definitely looking at doing testing in the city of Boston sometime by the end of the year,” said Kris Carter, co-chairman of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, City Hall’s experimental division. “We’ve been talking with a large number of partners.”
Although details for a pilot program are still up in the air — including where, how long and how many cars — Carter said the city and WEF have already been talking to a variety of self-driving car companies.
Carter declined to name the companies, but did say the city will look to tap into the wealth of talent at local universities, area startups and work with car giants that have set up research labs here — including Toyota and Audi.
Massachusetts has also launched its own initiative to develop self-driving car policies that includes the possible development of a testing facility at Devens, the former U.S. Army base.
Karl Iagnemma, chief executive of Cambridge-based nuTonomy, which launched a self-driving taxi pilot program in Singapore last month, said Boston’s fickle weather, complex streets and infamous drivers will make the city an ideal place to test out self-driving cars.
“We’re definitely interested,” Iagnemma said. “It offers the entire range of driving difficulty and complexity, from easy driving environments to really the most complex driving environments.”
Prior to moving ahead with the tests, city officials will host a series of focus groups to talk about autonomous technology and find out what residents are comfortable with.
In a statement, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said Boston is “focused on the future of our city and how we safely move people around while providing them reliable mobility choices.”
©2016 the Boston Herald Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
