New AI Dispatch System Struggles With Downtown Waukesha One-Way Streets During First Week

THE Waukesha County Communications Center's newly installed AI-assisted call-handling platform logged its first five days of operation this week by misrouting emergency responders to the wrong location three separate times, in each case because the caller and the machine could not agree on which Broadway they meant.

The system, named Aurelian by its vendor and installed countywide on September 26, is designed to parse 911 calls in real time, extract an address, and route it to dispatch before a human has finished typing. County officials said the software performs as advertised in most of the county. Downtown Waukesha, where the one-way grid reverses itself from block to block along Broadway, St. Paul Avenue, and the streets around them, was not most of the county.

"The AI kept asking them to clarify if they meant 'the other Broadway,'" said dispatcher supervisor Martin Geils, 51, who has worked the center's floor for nineteen years and said he had never once heard a human dispatcher ask that question, mostly because the humans already knew which one.

Three Calls, Three Reroutes

Geils said the first misroute happened on day two, when a caller reporting a minor two-vehicle accident described her location as "by the one-way part downtown," which Aurelian narrowed to a 94 percent confidence match on a cross street four blocks from where the caller actually stood. A responding squad arrived, found nothing, and was redirected by a human dispatcher roughly six minutes later.

The second and third incidents, both on day four, involved callers who gave directions in terms of which way traffic was currently allowed to flow rather than a street name, a method Geils said works fine for a local but reads to the system as missing data. In one case the platform asked a caller twice whether she meant the segment of Broadway "northbound of the civic center or northbound of the library," a distinction Geils said does not exist and never has.

"I've lived here nineteen years and I still get the one-way thing wrong in my own truck. I didn't expect the computer to get it wrong too, but here we are, together."

— Martin Geils, dispatch supervisor

No injuries resulted from any of the three reroutes, and in each case a human dispatcher corrected the location within minutes. County officials characterized the delays as between four and seven minutes, a range Geils said "feels longer when it's your call."

A 400-Word Fix

In response, county IT uploaded what officials described as a 400-word downtown navigation primer to Aurelian's training database on Thursday, covering the directional flips on Broadway and St. Paul Avenue block by block. The document does not currently mention the Newhall Avenue underpass, the one at-grade route beneath the rail line between West Avenue and Grand Avenue, which county spokesperson Renata Klos said was "a separate project" when asked whether it might help the system route around downtown confusion entirely.

Klos said the vendor, a Madison-based firm under a three-year contract with the county, has been "responsive" and is treating the downtown grid as a known edge case rather than a defect. She declined to say how much of the contract's cost was attributable to the one-way streets specifically, saying only that the question "doesn't really work that way."

Councilman Gary Puchalski, asked whether the city might consider repainting any of the downtown one-way signage to be more machine-legible, said the signage was "already legible to anyone who grew up here," and suggested the fix belonged on the software side.

What's Next

Geils said the center has had no further misroutes in the two days since the primer was uploaded, though he noted that stretch has not yet included a caller trying to describe the St. Paul Avenue flip during rush hour, which he called "the real test." He said human dispatchers remain on every call regardless of what Aurelian recommends, and that the system's role for now is to save typing, not to make the final call.

"It'll get there," Geils said. "It's basically a new hire. We didn't fire anybody for asking which Broadway the first week either."