Ecopia AI Provides Santa Fe Metropolitan Planning Organization with High-Precision Data to Advance Transportation Planning

September 10, 2025 - Toronto - Today, Ecopia AI (Ecopia) announces the delivery of high-precision transportation mapping data to the Santa Fe Metropolitan Planning Organization (Santa Fe MPO). This detailed mapping data will enhance infrastructure assessment and support transportation planning efforts in the region.

The Santa Fe MPO is responsible for transportation planning for the Santa Fe, New Mexico metropolitan area, working closely with member agencies like the City of Santa Fe, Santa Fe County, the Pueblo of Tesuque, and the New Mexico Department of Transportation. Its planning area encompasses approximately 25% of Santa Fe County’s 1,911 square mile land area and includes 80% of its population.

After discovering how other metropolitan planning organizations had leveraged Ecopia’s high-precision geospatial data for planning, Santa Fe MPO decided to partner with Ecopia to quickly obtain a comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date view of transportation infrastructure. 

“As a small team, we don’t have the capacity to manually collect data,” said Leah Yngve, Transportation Planner at the Santa Fe MPO. “We needed a reliable and scalable way to gain a more comprehensive view of street characteristics to aid in planning efforts and crash analysis.” 

Ecopia’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered mapping systems ingest imagery to generate detailed vector layers of transportation infrastructure. Having been trained on tens of millions of square miles of imagery, Ecopia’s systems deliver data with the same level of accuracy as a trained GIS professional, but in a fraction of the time required for manual digitization. 

Ecopia delivered key transportation features across the Santa Fe region, including roads, sidewalks, planting strips, crosswalks, shoulders, bike lanes, medians, and intersections, providing a foundational dataset to support a wide range of planning initiatives.

The Santa Fe MPO team plans to use this data in several ways to enhance the region’s transportation networks. This includes quickly identifying streets with space to add new bike lanes, analyzing and understanding street characteristics that are associated with crashes, and efficiently locating gaps in the sidewalk network to prioritize pedestrian improvements. “This data, combined with the results of an upcoming crash analysis, should help guide street design decisions,” said Yngve.

“Santa Fe MPO is taking a forward-looking approach by using data that makes block-level analysis both affordable and scalable,” said Abigail Coholic, Senior Director at Ecopia AI. “That kind of foundation is what FHWA has emphasized through MIRE, shifting safety work from reacting to crashes toward proactively addressing risky designs, something that has traditionally been too resource-intensive to pursue manually at scale.”

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About Santa Fe Metropolitan Planning Organization
Santa Fe was designated a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) in 1982 by the federal government when the population of the metropolitan area reached 50,000. The MPO Planning Area covers approximately 25% of Santa Fe County’s land area and includes 80% of its population and 90% of its employment. The purpose of the MPO is to create a forum for transportation decision-making in the metropolitan planning area. The Santa Fe MPO is responsible for facilitating cooperation, consistency, and connectivity between all transportation planning efforts within the Santa Fe metropolitan area, promoting a multi-modal, regional transportation system that is safe and energy and fiscally efficient, maximizing community connectivity, serving the mobility needs of all citizens, and existing in harmony with the environment. Learn more at https://santafempo.org/

About Ecopia AI
Ecopia is on a mission to create a digital twin of the Earth. We leverage artificial intelligence to convert high-resolution imagery into high-precision 3D vector map data at scale. This data creates a digital representation of the physical world, forming the foundation of a digital twin for visualization, analytics, and decision-making. Ecopia’s data is leveraged by hundreds of commercial and government organizations across more than 100 countries around the world.