The intersection of telecom, sensors and transportation to create “smart cities” is the concept that Adrian Pearmine discusses in the above video. Pearmine, National Director for Smart Cities and Connected Vehicles for DKS Associates, delves into the recent U.S. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge and how it could be the catalyst for change in mobility, the way Google Fiber drove gigabit broadband service in urban areas.
As Pearmine describes, the $40M DOT Smart City Challenge was not prescriptive, allowing cities to shape proposals that best fit their needs. DKS Associates and Pearmine were intimately involved in the submission by Portland, Oregon, one of seven finalists out of an initial round of 78 cities, which was ultimately awarded to Columbus, Ohio.
For its submission, Portland focused on three distinct corridors to demonstrate the benefits of adding connectivity and autonomous features to transportation:
- One corridor with dense urban in-fill on one end to under-served communities on the other end
- Another corridor with a great deal of freight traffic and industrial uses that are difficult to serve with traditional transit
- An area with relatively high rates of pedestrian fatalities and under-served in terms of last-mile transit
To this last issue of the last-mile access, he talks of an approach whereby they would complement existing transit with the addition an electric circulator shuttles that initially would be piloted with a human and, eventually, be autonomously driven.
To improve truck throughput, reduce emissions, and enhance safety, they proposed a test of truck and transit signal priority, along the industrial corridor. Further, they were looking at multi-modal communications, extending to pedestrians and bicyclists. Combining sensors, such as motion detectors, with Vehicle to Infrastructure communications to give drivers a warning of an oncoming pedestrian or bicyclist as well as create the opportunity for signaling that adapts to actual traffic, instead of fixed timing.
Pearmine points out that, in addition to better real-time traffic decisions, part of the proposal was a big-data play to allow better long-term decisions. He points to the power of opening up the data to leverage the power of the crowd to help find nuggets of information that could help planners, transportation engineers and businesses deploy resources more efficiently. And as Pearmine emphasizes, a key element to creating the smart city of tomorrow, is the fundamental building block of a robust communications infrastructure.
