For a species that would like to see self-driving cars stick to the letter of the law, we humans don’t make things easy. We let lane lines fade and stop signs fall down. We fail to mark speed limits and flag pop-up construction sites. For the most part, humans can handle this lack of clarity. For robots, it can be baffling.

So consider the AV Road Rules Platform a helping hand. The new effort, launched today by transportation analytics firm Inrix, is a tool that lets cities pull together all the rules they expect human drivers to follow, and translate them into a computer-friendly format that any self-driving developer can fold into its software.

Today, before a developer can put its robo-cars on the road, it must gather piles of data: which streets have which speed limits, where the school zones are, how many lanes any stretch of road has, and so on. The standard method of collecting this data is to drive all the streets in question, and use the cars’ sensors to spot and log every road sign and lane marking. That’s neither efficient nor infallible. It can take half a dozen trips up and down any street to get everything you need. Road signs go missing and lane lines fade. And even then, the process relies on the computer’s ability to translate symbols designed for human eyes into its mother tongue of zeros and ones.

Built off tech that helps people find parking, Inrix's new program is the kind of thing everyone in the self-driving world can get down with. Inrix

Inrix, which you may know for its rankings of cities by the horrorshowiness of their traffic, believes the Road Rules system can make this process easier by getting cities to provide the data. This solution seems pretty agreeable—any city that welcomes self-driving cars wants those cars to follow the rules—but the problem is that municipal governments, departments of transportation, and other governmental bodies rarely have all the necessary information in one place. There’s never been much of a need for a list of every road sign or school zone, and so there’s never been a good way to make that list.

Until now.

Inrix started down this path in 2015, when it acquired ParkMe, an app that digitizes parking information like street cleaning hours. It wasn’t long before the company realized it could use that same tech to consolidate a whole lot more information and use it to help robots as well as humans. And so, over the past year, Inrix created the Road Rules platform, which lets cities put all the info a robo-car could want in one place.