The Smart Cities Of Now: Smarter Transportation For Improved Quality Of Life
The world stands at the cusp of the most significant step in the evolution of transportation since the Wright brothers took flight off a sand dune in Kitty Hawk in 1903. The digital revolution that has transformed how we work and play is doing the same for our personal transportation options and a city’s mass transit systems. Yet, these developments are experiencing some growing pains. There are bicycle-sharing graveyards. Cities struggle to build the necessary physical and networking infrastructures to support the new services private sector companies are introducing to the public transportation space. The onus is on smart city planners to prioritize the creation of conditions needed to embrace these new services the sharing economy and autonomous vehicles are introducing.
Before we examine present-day transportation issues, it’s worth looking back over the fairly recent history of how the evolution of transportation has had a direct impact on the need to build smart cities.
The invention of the steam engine in the 19th century made it easier to supply the people and created urban centers. Delivering electricity to individual homes and businesses revolutionized how people lived and worked, and drove the economy. It made cities vertical. In the early 20th century, Henry Ford began rolling Model-T cars off his famous assembly line, and airplanes forever transformed world travel.
Today, new technologies have made our vehicles and mass transit system more convenient and faster. Cars can anticipate an accident and hit the brakes before it occurs. Buses, trains and planes are equipped with Wi-Fi and other modern amenities.
Tomorrow, the digital revolution will make self-driving cars and trucks powered by electricity commonplace. High-speed trains will connect cities, and people will move within those cities on buses and rail systems that run on schedules and routes dictated by computer algorithms that make delays and missed connections just bad memories.
Consider how new information and communications technologies have already enabled the creation of new services that were not possible just a few years ago. We have mobile data networks that not only connect all of us, but can confirm our digital identities and locations down to the centimeter. Ride sharing providers like Uber and Lyft are the perfect examples of how to combine the computing capacity of the smartphone, identity and recommendation systems to generate a system of reputation and trust, and smart transportation to get us where we need to go faster and at less cost.
These technologies are critical to solving the problems of pollution, traffic congestion and inadequate access to social services that plague cities of all sizes around the world. Problems that are only growing worse as more people move to cities. More than a half of the world population lives in the cities. By the year 2050, there will be 2 and a half billion people that will live in cities. That means that on average, 200,000 people move into cities every day.
Welcoming all these people creates huge challenges for city planners and their private sector partners around construction, job creation, the availability of good schools, hospitals, police and fire coverage, maintaining roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
Failure to overcome these challenges will make it impossible to prevent escalating housing costs, traffic congestion, and pollution levels. This is where the digital transformation driving the maturation of the sharing economy and the autonomous vehicles will help.
Commuters already have several options, from traditional mass transit services like buses and subways, to newer options like bike-sharing and ride-sharing services, many provided by private companies working on their own, or partnering with local government agencies. In fact, these services are more mature than many people may realize.
Bike sharing started in Copenhagen in 1995, and has spread around the world. The newest iteration is the dockless approach, which enables riders to leave bikes equipped with location-awareness services in any area where bike parking is allowed, easy to find by the next rider. The whole process is enabled and driven by simple mobile applications.
We’re seeing car-sharing and car-pooling services such as those offered by private companies like Avis, Daimler, Chariot and Via, evolve in the same manner. Autonomous cars are the next phase, and they promise to deliver benefits that include lower energy consumption and fewer accidents. Tesla is reportedly developing a model that will enable you to rent your car to other passengers. Your car will be linked to central software based on the Tesla Network. Tesla’s software will handle everything from bookings to payment to rating passengers. The idea is that one car can service dozens of people, instead of every one of those people owning their own cars.
The sharing economy is proving to be less expensive and improve quality of life for city residents and visitors. But as more private companies enter the transportation sector, which has long been dominated by government agencies, cities will have difficulties managing this growth.
They have to adapt the roads to these new modes of transportation. Some are already creating corridors in the center and from the suburbs to the city center.
They must also transform bus stops, train and taxi stations, parking areas, and even airports, into smart locations that enable travelers to determine in real-time when they can pick up their buses, carpooling services, taxis/trains, etc. Just like they’re able to do now with Uber of Lyft.
This requires the constant collection and distribution of data from the transportation services, vehicles and the users. For example, my company, Connecthings collects commuter intents and provides that data to mobile applications to enrich the user experience.
Cities can gather huge amounts of data about how and why people are traveling: Are the commuting to work, or going shopping, meeting friends at a restaurant, or heading to the sports stadium for the big game? Where are they waiting, what modes of transportation do they prefer to use, what businesses are near them?
Connecthings gathers this data, and can provide contextual information to apps that use their software to better engage with customers based on their location, preferences, etc. Cities can leverage this data, along with location services, IoT, and artificial intelligence technologies to learn how to better direct traffic flows and where to provide mass transit options.
The role the city will be to regulate and coordinate all modes — pedestrians, bikes, cars, bus, trucks — and all services. Autonomous vehicles should not be a stand alone system. All transportation services must communicate with the city and with each other.
City planners that want to move their smart city plans off the drawing board face a number of challenges, and short time frames as more people move into their cities. Fortunately for them, the transportation industry is evolving just as quickly, and if ride-sharing, car-pooling, autonomous vehicles and smart mass transit systems are well integrated, residents will enjoy faster and safer commutes, much less traffic congestion, and improved access to social services. In short, you can draw a direct line between a smarter transportation system and improved quality of life.
