However you moved around downtown during the World Cup — rideshare, bus, bike, scooter or on foot — the ride was smoother than it was two years ago. The city now has a number for it.
According to the Atlanta Department of Transportation, pre-tournament repairs and repaving left roadways across downtown in their best condition in years, with potholes cut by 60 percent compared with 2024. Downtown’s pavement condition index climbed from “fair” at 63.5 to “good” at 75.3 on a 100-point scale over the same stretch.
Whether that adds up to the “trophy-worthy downtown” ATLDOT officials have claimed is a matter of taste. What is not in dispute is that the work is about to get much wider.
The data layer under the asphalt
The downtown improvements came out of the city’s 2025 Downtown Pavement Program, which ATLDOT guided using continuously updated road data supplied by Cyvl, an AI-powered infrastructure intelligence platform built for cities.
Cyvl combines advanced imagery, LiDAR sensors and AI analysis in a purpose-built platform to assess street conditions. ATLDOT says the approach lets the city scan and analyze its full 1,450-mile road network — roughly the distance from downtown Atlanta to Chicago and back — in days rather than months, at a fraction of traditional survey costs. Data covering nearly 70 percent of Atlanta’s roadways has been collected so far.
From one district to every neighborhood
The city is now pursuing an expanded citywide partnership that would cover not just streets but sidewalks, curb ramps and street signs. The stated goal is the same objective insight that made the downtown turnaround possible, applied everywhere — so the city can decide where to invest, what to fix first, and how far each infrastructure dollar goes.
ATLDOT Commissioner Solomon Caviness said a continuously updated picture of the full road network also strengthens the city’s position when it goes after outside funding.
“Atlanta is exactly the kind of community Cyvl was built for,” said Cyvl CEO Daniel Pelaez, describing public works teams nationally as managing aging infrastructure on tightening budgets with data that is years out of date — reacting to failures instead of preventing them.
For downtown, the practical test comes next. The tournament crowds that stress-tested those 25 miles of fresh pavement are gone; what the district finds out over the next two years is whether a data-driven maintenance cycle holds the gains, or whether the smooth ride was a one-time pre-event push.
Reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta. Read the original: City: AI-driven approach slashed downtown potholes by 60 percent.