Sacramento’s Capitol Park is a hive of activity this month, as office workers and pollinators alike are drawn to beautiful spring blooms. But the buzz of activity in the park is eclipsed by the rush of work happening inside the Capitol building, where lawmakers are jockeying to get their priorities reflected in the state budget. 

A key priority for the Sacramento region is the $400 million that Senator Richard Pan and Assemblymember Ken Cooley have requested to fund the Sacramento region’s Green Means Go pilot program.   

This is a four-year pilot aimed at accelerating infill development in the six-county region and complementing that construction with innovative and green mobility solutions that can provide reliable alternatives to driving alone. Infill development, which means building within communities that are already established, is a way to reduce urban sprawl and leapfrog growth. READ MORE

Curious passers-by in downtown Sacramento yesterday could be forgiven for wondering why TV crews were clustered around an ordinary looking black Lincoln sedan. Sure, Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg was in the passenger seat but the most innovative feature of the car was nowhere to be seen: it was a remote driver sitting in their office in Mountain View, 120 miles away. 

The Phantom Auto test drive was the end-cap to months of mapping and testing the 4G mobile network in Sacramento to make sure an autonomous vehicle could be safely driven by a remote operator. California law requires any company testing autonomous vehicles on public roads to have a human driver overseeing the “driverless” vehicle who can take over control when an AV encounters a scenario it can’t safely handle on its own, such as emergency road closures, construction detours and four-way stop intersections. 

That has generally meant a human inside the vehicle but Phantom Auto’s teleoperation system means the remote driver could be thousands of miles away. The catch is that the cellular network needs to be very robust, as the system depends on data from the car being sent to the remote operator and back in less than a second. READ MORE