A Smart City Starts Here

Is more technology the answer to solving cities’ biggest problems?

It doesn’t take a genius to spot the biggest trend to come out of city government in the last decade: smart cities.

The movement around using new technology to create more livable places is as much talked-about as it is hard to sum up. Data plays a strong role; many smart-city initiatives propose using arrays of sensors to keep tabs on everything from air quality to traffic speeds to gunshots to city vehicle locations. The idea is that these talkative new data sources will allow cities to be aware of their infrastructure and environment in real time — and in turn, operate more efficiently, respond quickly to unsafe conditions, and engage in data-driven urban planning.

With global spending on smart cities expected to reach $158 billion by 2022, it’s safe to say the chips are on the table (and on the garbage trucks, you might say).

The intentions behind this are sound: put sensors on anything you can, and use the reams of resulting data to foster equity, address urgent problems, and inform service delivery.

These are formidable selling points. But before your city moves ahead with getting smart (and the hefty price tag), consider this: your city already has a bunch of sensors it isn’t using properly. They’re everywhere, they’re free, and they’re ready to start churning out data that’s innately more apt to make your city a better place.

People.

Houston, We Have a Pothole

As any city councilperson will tell you, the people of your burg are pounding the pavement — constantly, it would seem — spotting uncollected trash, driving into potholes, hearing noisome noise, and being flustered by graffiti. How can government turn these sentiments into a high-value data product?

Many cities have a platform for getting in touch with officials on a non-emergency basis called “311”, a nod to the phone number you can dial to file a complaint about something city-related, or to ask about public services. An analysis of seven years of 311 data from New York City showed the most common gripes were noise complaints, bad parking, and water problems.

(For the curious, here’s a brilliant graphic history of 311, from its beginnings as an experiment in Baltimore in the mid-90s to unclog the 911 phone lines.)

Today, all of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. offer some sort of 311 service, and all but one (not naming names, but Phoenix) offer a smartphone app. New York City’s NYC311 saw a record 44 million customer interactions in 2018, with a 30% increase in smartphone-generated requests compared to the previous year.

311 is widespread and the sensors are live, but it still isn’t living up to its potential for gathering down-to-the-minute, hyperlocal urban data. Why?

The 10-Year Beta

311 apps have come a long way since they first launched in the early 2010s. Today, some have slick, welcoming interfaces, and a possibly even a few good reviews on the app stores (a minor miracle in public-sector tech).

In spite of this progress, once you get beyond the first few moments of affirming messages and new-school onboarding, the user experience tends to come up short in one or more of these areas:

1. Being hit with a lot of questions. I’ve lived in three major cities with 311 apps, and they’ve all made me groan a bit even when reporting something as simple as a pothole. How big is it? How would you describe the shape? Is it near a construction site? Are there any delivery vehicles or small children sticking out of it? If your form is too long, and especially if you require people to answer those questions, you risk losing your most engaged do-gooders. These questions may not feel like a big lift to those in government — after all, they’re there to move things along more quickly on the back end, which is a good thing, right? — but they challenge a fairly basic property of human behavior: if you make it hard, people won’t do it.
2. Seeing the silos. If your app involves going through a maze-like menu that reflects the internal fiefdoms of your city, you’re not thinking about government the way most people do. Going back to the pothole example, if you ask me if it’s next to a gas valve (behind the scenes: because that pothole should be fixed by the gas company), you’re going to get the answer of someone who has no idea what a gas valve looks like. Similarly, if I get to the end of your form only to be told “sorry, we don’t do that, please pick up the phone and dial 888-GAS-DEPT”, I’m not going to be thrilled either. Give the illusion that there’s a single, unified System handling people’s needs, and keep the back-office spaghetti out of view.
3. Dancing with a robot. It’s happened more times than I can count: I took the time to report a leaking hydrant, backed-up storm drain, or yes, a pothole, only to get an email the next day that my request was closed. That’s all — “closed”. The questions this spawns are myriad. Was it fixed? Did they have trouble finding it? Was it not shocking enough? Should I have sounded more despondent? If your customer-bound messages lack context or clarity, people will feel like you aren’t listening, which only reinforces the notion that government doesn’t care. For bonus points, lay on the empathy, because you do care and you want them to know that.

People are eager to be your boots on the ground, but don’t forget their mindset is: “I’m going to be a good Samaritan and report this thing. It had better be easy.” If the effort outweighs the perceived benefit, one of your sensors just went kaput. And now it’s talking to another sensor about how your city tech is a let-down. Expect an outage.

A Time for Everything

311 is square one for any city that wants to project that it’s forward-thinking, easy to do business with, and therefore: smart. It may feel like a done deal in your city — it’s there, people are using it. But treating it like a box to check off your modernization list does a disservice to the most effective tool you have to build a rapport with your constituents.

If you haven’t scrutinized how people interact with 311 and how satisfied they are with it, do not pass “go”. Do not collect a multimillion-dollar grant for traffic-sensing streetlights. Take the time to iterate on citizen experience in your city. More tech isn’t always the answer. Agonize over the business processes that could be simplified. Strategize on how you communicate with customers. Hire a consultant to help you see the knots you can’t. When that’s done, roll out the sensors and big data.

The rub here isn’t that the core tenets of smart cities are wrong, or that they aren’t being talked about with citizens’ best interests at heart. On the contrary, we should all appreciate the value of seeking new infrastructure that helps keep us safe, conserves resources, and enables informed decisions.

But every city has a hierarchy of needs — and it’s important to see how something like $185 million of next-gen streetlights stacks up against the issues people perceive as paramount in their own communities. The optics of pursuing long-term efficiencies with high price tags may be difficult in the near term for a reason.

The rise of smart cities is rightly intriguing, but when it comes to listening to the people who live in them, we may still have some wising up to do.