Smart Cities: Identifying Needs, Finding Solutions

AFTER CRAFTING A SMART CITY VISION, cities must prioritize their needs before they can find solutions, shortlist vendors, deploy equipment and implement projects to deliver the desired outcomes. Public safety is typically the topmost need for many cities, followed by other priorities such as connectivity, sustainability, resilience, equitability and inclusivity as well as job creation and economic growth. Below are brief snapshots of how cities can identify their needs in various domains and draw up a plan of action to meet them.

AREAS OF EARLY FOCUS

Public safety. Planning for and maintaining safety in urban settings call for a coordinated approach among departments and agencies. Technology can help — many U.S. cities are using data to do predictive analytics using data culled from multiple sources, such as video feeds from the traffic department’s cameras and sensors on everything from water tanks to street lights and trash bins. Jesse Berst, chairman of the Smart Cities Council, said Charlotte, Va. is able to distill its analytics down to the individual level and “tell an officer which crime is most likely to happen in his or her neighborhood today, and can be watching out for that.” Analytics and cloud storage infrastructure also are helping police departments across the U.S. deploy body cameras, or bodycams, worn by officers on duty. The bodycams generate huge volumes of data, usually in terabytes, that conventional data storage facilities cannot handle. Oakland, Calif., which has deployed the largest number of bodycams of any U.S. city, is partnering with the product’s maker, Vievu, and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to manage all the data they generate. New York City and Aurora, Ill. are among other early adopters of bodycams. These cameras record incidents that help both prevent incidents of police abuse and to avoid false charges against officers. Meanwhile, Oakland reported a 75% drop in “use of force” complaints — to 572 in 2014 from 2,220 in 2009 — after it deployed bodycams. The city used 620 bodycams in 2009, and is now buying another 800 at a cost of nearly $1.3 million to cover its needs for the next five years. Urban mobility. This is a priority that lends itself neatly to technological solutions. Mobile applications, or apps, not only provide access to mass transit schedules and purchase of tickets, they also can map optimal routes for drivers to avoid traffic congestion or accidents, supply weather information as well as pinpoint highway rest stops and calculate tolls. A bonus would be a reduction in the city’s carbon footprint as a result of an improvement in urban mobility. Sustainability. A few years ago, Orlando, Fla., which is home to Disney World and Universal Studios, decided to focus on energy efficiency as part of its sustainability objectives. That was a priority because it found that most of the greenhouse gas emissions came from the buildings in the city. It first targeted the worst offenders: buildings that were 50,000 square feet or larger, which turned out to be 5% of the total number of buildings. The city launched a program that would track energy performance in those buildings, and assign Energy Star ratings based on their energy efficiency. The program was designed to measure energy usage and reduce water usage. Over time, it could indirectly encourage property owners to make energy efficiency investments, although they are not required to do so. Serving the needs of the most vulnerable. Cities increasingly want to become more compassionate towards the needs of the most vulnerable, such as the elderly, poor, disabled or underserved ethnic communities. In public transportation, that often involves last-mile and first-mile access, which essentially is to provide transport from residents’ homes to mass transit stations and get to elder care centers, a job or other locations. “The typical job is accessible to only about 27% of its metropolitan workforce by transit in 90 minutes or less,” according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT). Compassionate cities would also try to have affordable mass transit for all neighborhoods and not just some parts. “Most of the of the solutions we’re talking about, especially in areas like transportation, are aimed at solving some of the underlying issues that we see in cities around disadvantaged communities,” said Dominie Garcia, smart cities program lead at Battelle, an advisory services firm. That could mean providing opportunities or access to transportation to communities that have traditionally been geographically isolated and are economically disadvantaged. Another example: efforts to bridge the so-called ‘digital divide,’ which may take the form of free public Wi-Fi. “Start with a needs-based assessment — what do we really want? What are the challenges and the problems we want to solve?” Garcia said. Such introspection, she added, is “an embedded piece of a smart city.” For Columbus, Ohio, it drafted a central data system to develop applications for the delivery of services. These included scheduling and automatically rescheduling of appointments with transit tracking, apps for multimodal trip planning, payment systems and assistance for people with disabilities. It also planned a “smart corridor” that connected underserved neighborhoods to jobs and services, smart traffic signals, smart street lighting, traveler information and payment kiosks, and free public Wi-Fi. These efforts led to Columbus winning the DoT’s Smart City Challenge grant of up to $40 million, which attracted matches such as $10 million from Vulcan, the philanthropic vehicle of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Prioritizing the right goals is critical because it can have serious consequences. For example, life expectancy disparities are huge between Cleveland and its surrounding areas. “You take an eight-mile drive from Cleveland’s neighborhoods of Lyndhurst to Hough, and life expectancy drops by 24 years,” said Seeta Hariharan, general manager and group head, Digital Software & Solutions Group, Tata Consultancy Services. The same is true of London. “You take the tube from London’s Oxford Circus to Silver Lane — the life expectancy drops by 21 years.” That life expectancy gap occurs because of health disparities. “But health disparities don’t occur unless there are also disparities in transportation, education, housing, food access and work force development,” she added. “Smart cities must balance resources for the betterment of the basic needs of its citizens before taking on smarter parking.” One country way ahead on this effort is the Netherlands. In 2016, it became the first country to roll out a nationwide network dedicated to IoT that can connect millions of devices and sensors to the internet. Many applications use this network to deliver services to enhance the lives of citizens. “This has fueled development of working prototypes by the local companies like an application to control and monitor its extensive drainage and flood control infrastructure,” Hariharan said. Once goals are prioritized, it’s important for municipalities to take an integrated, cross-cutting approach to building a smart city. One early goal would be to provide a single portal where citizens can access all city services. In a smart city, this could mean providing access through mobile devices or setting up smart street kiosks. Cities should aim to provide one common experience for users, whether they are seeking a license, pay taxes or report an open manhole. It becomes unwieldy if each city department had its own portal or app — be it garbage collection or water service. New York’s NYC311 mobile app is one example, although several other U.S. cities

have similar apps, as well as places like Yinchuan, China and Singapore. An integrated model could extend beyond the apps level, as the cross-cutting approach applies at every layer of the stack. For example, the data underlying the apps could also reside on one platform that could talk to sensors installed by multiple city agencies. With one command, an administrator could communicate with the platform, which could then convey a signal with an instruction to any of the sensors connected to it. Common platforms could also anchor citywide data gathering and data architecture. Some U.S. cities are beginning to sign agreements with large companies to implement such platforms.

FOUR TECHNOLOGY LAYERS

Smart cities need to establish four layers of technology: sensors, networks, platforms and applications, according to the paper, “The development of smart cities in China,” by Yongling Li, Yanliu Lin and Stan Geertman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The sensors gather the data, be it through RFID tags or QR codes, and the networks (TV, broadband and other communication channels) facilitate the transfer of information. The platforms are where all the information is processed, analyzed, secured and managed as it links to various applications that provide services such as tracking public buses in real time. Singapore and China are further along on the platform path. Singapore launched SingPass in 2003, a gateway to as many as 400 city services that citizens could access with one login ID and password. Meanwhile, the city of Yinchuan in China’s northwestern province of Ningxia Hui is among the most talked-about of the country’s 500-plus emerging smart cities. Facial recognition technology enables citizens to pay bus fares, for example, without reaching for their wallets; sensors and renewable energy can power services such as trash pickups; and most City Hall services such as passport renewals or securing licenses no longer require face-to-face interactions, and have moved online. (With a platform approach, it is not necessary for all city departments and agencies to be ready for web interaction. They can get onboard to provide the same user experience when they are ready.) Carbondale, a town of 25,000 people in Illinois, did not have a sophisticated work ordering system or tracking software. “Sticky notes were the most popular way of passing information back and forth, followed by phone calls and emails,” according to SeeClickFix, a provider of apps that help city residents connect with the local government for a range of service requests. So Carbondale sourced a customized app from SeeClickFix in 2016 that let residents send service requests and report problems. It led to the city’s public works department getting better organized while communication improved and brought more accountability to the city council. Importantly, communication between the resident and the government must be two-way. For example, if a resident reports that there’s a pothole in the street through a government app, ideally the city should ensure that when the work crew gets the job done, it flags that the hole is fixed and sends a picture of the repair to the person who reported it. “It’s about building in this two-way conversation,” Berst said. “It’s not just about hearing from citizens or telling them — it’s a dialog.”

NAVIGATING POLITICS

Be mindful of the politics around smart city projects. Some cities may face few obstacles in implementing a smart solution for a problem, while others may face political or budget constraints. Duranton offered the example of San Francisco’s SFPark parking system that uses a demand- response pricing mechanism that makes it easier for drivers to find parking spots and helps reduce congestion. “If the demand is for less than 50% of the parking spots, the price will be low, but when that crosses 80%, the price goes up; and when it reaches 90% it really goes up so that people don’t need to cruise forever to find a parking space” because the cost becomes prohibitive. SFPark aims to maintain occupancy of parking spots at between 60% and 80%, with rates going down to as low as 50 cents an hour in times of low demand and up to $7 an hour for high-demand times. It adjusts rates no more than once a month for each block. Launched in 2011 as a pilot project on 7,000 of the city’s nearly 29,000 parking spaces, SFPark made its latest adjustment in January 2017 — the 20th such adjustment since launch. The project has been hailed a success with significant drops in distances traveled by drivers before finding a parking spot, and a decline in average parking rates they paid. San Francisco’s example is not easily replicable. Take Philadelphia’s parking practices. “San Francisco is doing ‘smart’ parking and Philadelphia is doing ‘dumb’ parking,” he said. “The issue is two-fold. One is a technical aspect; the other is a political aspect. The reason Philadelphia is doing ‘dumb’ parking is because there is a bad political economy associated with that, in the sense that fewer people in San Francisco own cars compared to a lot more in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, car owners expect to be able to park for free or for [the resident parking fee of ] $35 a year, which is just insanely low.” His conclusion: “It’s all very good to have technical solutions, but unless we understand the context and the politics around different issues, we can be pretty smart but that won’t lead us anywhere.”