The National Roads Authority is inviting bidders to provide mobile 360-degree imagery to update Google Street View of all public roads in Grand Cayman.
The authority says the imagery, which would be represented as Google Street View on Google Maps and Google Earth platforms, will be used to support data collection and analysis of roadway assets and features on local roads.
Brian Chin Yee, chief operations and engineering manager of the National Roads Authority, said the street views are updated regularly, and this is the third year the authority has invited outside bidders to take images.
He told the Compass that the authority tries to update the street views of the entire island annually, “so that gives us a history of the road progression and development in Grand Cayman”.
The authority has previously taken its own images and uploaded them to Google Street View, but as the road network has expanded over the years, it is now inviting outside agencies and companies to take on the project, he said.
Chin Yee added that Google Maps enables users to see earlier images of the local roads, “so you can go back to different years, like 2020, 2021, and so forth, and see what they looked like”.
While there are others with 360-degree cameras who have been uploading road or location footage to Google Street View, Chin-Yee said the NRA is the only agency that has been mapping the entire island.
According to the request for proposals issued on the government Bonfire procurement site earlier this month, the project involves taking images of public roads, and their surrounds, with gated communities and private stratas only being included by special permission.
The project would include the location of objects, such as people, cars, streetlights, power poles, street name signs, manhole covers, lane markings, crosswalks and speed humps, the RFP notes.
All imagery video must be at a minimum of 4k to ensure clear capture of object markers, it said.
The deadline for submissions of bids is 5 June.
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