Editor’s note: Today’s blog post comes from Scott VerBracken, Vice President Automotive Services and Kevin Alberta, Assistant Vice President of Business Technology at AAA - The Auto Club Group (ACG), the second-largest AAA club in North America. They share how The Auto Club Group is using Roads Management Insights from Google Maps Platform to assess real-time roadside hazards and improve technician and driver safety.
Busy roadsides can be incredibly dangerous places to work; exposing technicians to significant hazards from passing traffic, limited visibility, weather, and changing road conditions. For us at AAA - The Auto Club Group, protecting our 9k+ field technicians is a deeply personal mission. We can’t put a price on peoples’ lives, so we’re always working to contribute to AAA's overall mission of safety both for members and our technicians.
For decades, these field technicians have had basic routing and coordinates, and we could provide them with some level of risk insight. Highway incidents, for example, are classified as high-risk locations, whereas street-level jobs are deemed lower risk. This system is helpful, but it doesn’t adjust to the dynamic conditions of actual roads like time of day, visibility, or traffic flow. We wanted to find a way to better protect our technicians, and that meant capturing real-time conditions at exact breakdown locations.
Our first hurdle was figuring out how to ingest large amounts of real-time traffic and weather data, and then we had to turn that into easy-to-read messages for our technicians. We also wanted to deliver those messages to the technicians’ existing Salesforce app, so the team didn’t need to purchase or download additional apps.
Once we had a solution ready, we also wanted to share it with more drivers and auto clubs as quickly as possible, so scalability was important to us. Equipping our technicians with industry-best insights keeps them and our members safer, and we can’t compromise on that. We found best-in-class companies like Google Maps Platform and Woolpert that are on the leading edge of innovation, data, and mobility to build with us.
Powering technician and member safety with large volumes of data
We started the project by building a data lake using Google Cloud and BigQuery to aggregate, analyze, and act on our data. That includes our extensive internal records as well as information gathered through Google Maps Platform solutions including the Places, Geocoding, and Weather APIs and Roads Management Insights (RMI). Then, with Woolpert, we could compile all of that information into a real-time risk assessment tool. With our roadside expertise, the data and technology knowledge at Google, and Woolpert’s digital innovation experience combined, we turned very complex datasets into simple, readable outputs for drivers in just seven weeks.
With Places and Geocoding APIs, we can identify member locations at the exact location of road service events. Combining that with the Weather API to score visibility based on time of day and RMI for granular, traffic speed and routing, we can provide more precise detail to our field technicians.
We can also access past technician notes and other internal data points to offer more precise information along single stretches of road. If, for example, we know that mile 15 on a 30-mile-long stretch of highway is a common area for accidents, we can now tell the driver to tow the vehicle to an offramp a few miles down the road to reduce the possibility of an accident.
All of this information is now packaged and shared with dispatchers and drivers through a three-tiered risk assessment that also helps determine what tools or vehicles may be the safest option for a given scenario. For "High" scores caused by poor visibility, for example, the system prioritizes dispatching trucks equipped with safety countermeasures like high-visibility reader boards.
Scaling drive safety for auto clubs countrywide
Since deploying the risk assessment solution to the Detroit metropolitan area, we’ve already processed more than 11,800 work orders. Our new responders appreciate the assistance, and veteran drivers who’ve taken a single route 100 times now have additional insights for potentially overlooked hazards. No one could take a single drive in every possible condition, and it helps us sleep better at night knowing we’ve given every technician an even better chance to make it through their shift safely.
Now that we’ve seen these successes, our next step is to expand the Michigan deployment to include Grand Rapids. By the end of 2027, we plan to roll it out to all major metro areas in our 14-state-wide service region and embed it across 5.5M+ annual service calls. This expansion will also coincide with ongoing improvements to the risk tool, including adding additional data points such as shoulder depth and weather forecasting. We’re exploring opportunities to share appropriate learnings and implementation resources with other AAA clubs, subject to applicable agreements, intellectual-property rights, security requirements, and separate approval by the participating organizations. We know that any organization that provides field service has the same objectives: keep their workers safe on the job, so we would love to see it reach more auto clubs — and even other industries — so that everyone has additional safety tools on hand.
