HorizonWatching

$50k ITS Congestion Challenge

Have an innovative idea on how to solve traffic congestion?   The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), in partnership with IBM and Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations (STCI), has launched a global challenge to identify innovative ideas for combating transportation congestion.

ITS America is challenging commuters, transportation experts, entrepreneurs and academic researchers to come up with the best ideas to reduce traffic congestion and lessen its economic and environmental impact.

At stake is a $50,000 prize presented at the 16th World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems in Stockholm, Sweden, this September.  The winner will also receive the development support needed to put his or her idea to work.

Winning ideas are expected to focus on the following five areas:

1. Speed and efficiency:  Using technology to reduce delays and transport people and goods efficiently and reliably.
2. Behavioral impact:  Innovative ways to convince users to choose options that reduce congestion.
3. Safety:  Preventing accidents, improving incident response and providing more timely, accurate transportation information.
4. Sustainability:  Lowering energy use and emissions while actively managing traffic and reducing congestion.
5. Economic competitiveness: Improve productivity through new technologies (e.g., wireless applications and mobility tools).

For additional information and to enter submissions, visit Join the ITS Congestion Challenge

Stockholm: 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year

The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) recently named Stockholm, Sweden the Intelligent Community of the Year for 2009.  The Scandanavian community, known for its prowess in innovative technologies and its quality of life won the 2009 award.  A detailed profile of Stockholm and why it was selected for the award can be found at this ICF website.

It’s nice to see Stockholm get this award, especially since IBM has been deeply involved in the city’s Intelligent Transportation initiatives.

Since 1999, ICF has presented awards to honor the achievements of communities tackling the complex task of building and maintaining competitive and inclusive local economies in the global Broadband Economy.   The ICF is a think tank that “focuses on the creation of prosperous local economies and robust societies in the broadband economy of the 21st Century”.  The goal of the yearly awards is to increase awareness of the role that broadband and information communications technology (ICT) play in economic and social development at the community level worldwide.

Earlier this year, the ICF had announced their annual list of The Top Seven Intelligent Cities of 2009.  These seven finalists were selected based on analysis of their nominations by a team of independent academic experts.  The academic team  conducts a thorough review of the nominations and generate quantitative scores during the selection process.   These cities have proactively re-engineered their economies and social networks to make them more flexible and adaptable, which gives them a powerful competitive advantage.  The top seven communities are chosen, not because they excel in all areas of ICF's Intellligent Community Indicators, but because each demonstrates excellence in at least one. 

The Top Seven cities of 2009 were:

• Bristol, Virginia, USA. Bristol has made an impact after taking on incumbent telcos in court and the state legislature to win the right to deploy a fiber network called OptiNet.  OptiNet will become a fiber-to-the-premises network for business and residents in Bristol and four neighboring counties.  It has attracted more than $50 million in private investment, including the region's first technology employers, and improved rural education and healthcare by connecting local providers to leading institutions.   
• Eindhoven, Netherlands.  Established a public-private collaboration called Brainport. Among more than 40 public-private projects are an award-winning coop that has brought FTTP and a broadband culture of use to the suburb of Neunen, and the SKOOL outsourced IT management system for public schools.
• Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.  When it could not get broadband from the private sector, Fredericton founded the e-Novations co-op, which deployed a fiber ring that spurred competition, giving the city a 70% penetration rate at speeds of up to 18 Mbps.  The next step was the Fred-eZone wireless network, which provides free WiFi service across 65% of the city.  The combination of broadband, entrepreneurship and Fredericton's universities has powered the creation of over 12,000 jobs.
• Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.  Beginning in 1980, a visionary mayor focused policy on creating an innovative, IT-based knowledge economy, implementing e-government, outsourcing IT needs, and taking advantage of liberalization to attract competitive fiber carriers deploying cost-effective broadband.  Public-private innovation includes a cyber-kindergarten for children, cyber tearooms for older citizens, citizen e-participation in decision-making, a successful business incubator and ICT-based real estate projects.
• Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. This bilingual community has become a major Canadian customer contact and back office center, and built a "near-shore" IT outsourcing industry.   Private-sector carriers have collaborated in the city's growth as a telecom-centric economy, and helped power the addition of 20,000 new jobs since the early 1990s.  
• Stockholm, Sweden. In the mid-90s, Stockholm, the economic and political capital of Sweden, established a company called Stokab to build an open-access fiber network.  Today, the 4,500 km network connects more than 90 competing service providers to government and business customers.  Though the city already has a 98% broadband penetration rate, Stokab will also provide FTTP access to over 95,000 low-income households in public housing by the end of 2009.  Stockholm also manages KISTA Science City, housing more than 1,400 companies, plus a support program for start-up and early-stage companies.  
• Tallinn, Estonia.   Making creative use of people and funding, Tallinn computerized its schools and deployed widespread WiFi as well as nearly 700 public access kiosks.  The city also developed a large-scale digital skills training program, extensive e-government, and an award-winning smart ID card.  Through partnerships, it developed high-tech parks including Ulemiste City, Tallinn Technology Park and Cooperative Cyber Defense Center. 

For more see this ICF website.  Also check out the videos here View Top7 Video

For those of you working on projects related to Smart Cities, you might also want to spend time reading the 49 page white paper “The Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2009”

Smart Bridges for a Smarter Planet

Bridges are critical elements of our transportation infrastructure.  Bridge failure, as we saw with the collapse of the I-35 bridge outside of Minneapolis, can be catastrophic.  Today, the developed nations of the world are having to deal with many bridges that are aging.  How can we monitor those bridges to better predict when they might fail?  In the United States there are a reported 600,000 bridges.

Looking for structural problems in bridges mostly still requires a visual inspection, The traditional practice of bridge inspection and bridge management has many limitations.  The most significant limitation is that the data collected is based solely upon visual inspection, augmented with limited mechanical methods such as hammer sounding or prying.   Visual inspection is highly variable, subjective and inherently unable to detect invisible deterioration, damage or distress.

In the future, we will have continuous electronic monitoring of bridges using a network of sensors at critical points.  Sensors can deliver volumes of data about how a bridge handles heavy traffic, harsh winters, high winds or other conditions.  Sensors can also alert us to serious problems long before they might be apparent to a human inspector during a visual inspection.

Picture Graphic from Businessweek.  See original image here

The bridge that crashed in Minneapolis in 2007 was replaced by a new smarter bridge, design and built in about a year.   It is a very modern bridge and is probably the smartest bridge in the USA and perhaps the world.   It is filled with sensors that are meant to monitor all the details necessary to prevent any collapse.   The new bridge holds more than 300 sensors that measure the effects of corrosion and temperature changes.   The sensor system will track weather, stresses and it will monitor traffic.  There’s also an automatic de-icing system which should really come in handy.  In addition to helping transportation officials monitor the health of the bridge, researchers at the University of Minnesota are analyzing the data to help design bridges better able to handle all the stresses.

For more information on Smart Bridges, see the following articles

• Center for American Progress:  Catching Crumbling Infrastructure- Sensor Technology Provides New Opportunity 
• University of California:  Experts and Research on Bridge and Infrastructure Safety
• BusinessWeek:  The Bridge to Smart Technology
• Wired: Thwarting Disaster: Bridges That Can Withstand Anything

Technology Can Improve Our Public Transit Experience

Technorati Tags:  IntelligentTransportationSystems ,  ITS ,  HorizonWatching ,  kiosks ,  publictransportation ,  publictransit

The past year, I've done some work researching the future market for Intelligent Transportation Systems.  One of the areas of critical importance is improving public transit systems. 

My vision (perhaps bluesky) is that at sometime in the future, there will be a screen behind each seat in a public transportation vehicle.  We see these screens popping up on planes traveling international routes...why not on public transportation vehicles?  To complement the screen at each seat idea there could be kiosks at key locations within the public transit system. 

Some ideas include:

• Mass Transit Vehicle - Every seat. This could be a nice aid as well, to even notify you when your stop is coming up or the status of your connections. 
• Mass Transit Vehicle - Extended route map.  Any bus or train car has a system route map on it.  That could be extended to include a touch screen in the corner for further info. Or, touch a stop on the main map and the screen shows local info (map, etc).  This would be lower cost than one screen for every seat. 
• Station/bus stop.  Kiosks could combine ticketing & info.  Small printers could print out travel itineraries to go along with a farecard (for out of towners or infrequent travelers). 
• Public gathering points.  For example, in the middle of a shopping mall, you could get transit info for your trip home, such as when the next bus/train will be coming so you can know when to stop shopping.  Could also be the lobby of an office building, etc. 
• Other exit points to mass attractions.  Tourist attractions (like Washington monument) could have a kiosk on exit to help get you to your next point.

In the mass transit vehicle version, I see the screen giving people access to information that they would not normally have access to.  Many people who depend on public transportation today do not own computers or even cell phones for that matter.  The kiosk screens would provide real-time information, including times due into the next stop, traffic information, congestion maps, etc. 

The screen would also allow them to do real-time multi-modal (bus, train, subway, taxi, water ferry) route planning and perhaps provide other basic Internet services (news, sports, weather) and access to other city Internet sites. 

Think of all the bus, train, taxi seats out there.  That's a ton of screens.  The screens would be placed by the city's transit authority.  The business model behind these kiosk screens would be advertising based and most likely be driven by location based advertising.  So if the bus was driving past Joe's Diner, the screen would pop up with an ad for Joe's Diner. 

A consideration in designing these future kiosks and the solutions embedded in them needs to be that different types of mass transit users have different needs 

• Tourists, out of town visitors 
• Senior citizens 
• Commuters 
• Discretionary users (i.e. some commuters might be persuaded to make non-commuting trips)

Other considerations include:

• Who needs a kiosk as compared to mobile phone/PDA? 
• What are the different information needs? 
• How much usage and advertising revenue might be driven by the users?

Down the road, perhaps the screen/kiosk would allow you to swipe your fare card or mobile phone and the information (and perhaps advertisements) would be customized for you.  By swiping your card, the transit authority would also, over time, be able to track the demographics of its ridership on certain routes and provide customized services based on those riders.

Traffic Congestion is a $78 Billion Annual Drain on the U.S. Economy

Traffic congestion continues to worsen in American cities of all sizes, creating a $78 billion annual drain on the U.S. economy in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel—that's 105 million weeks of vacation and 58 fully-loaded supertankers. 

The Texas Transportation Institute just released their 2007 Urban Mobility report.  I've been waiting for the release of this report for months.  This is report has been two years in the making.  It is a nationally known study of mobility and traffic congestion on freeways and major streets in American cities. Governments and Transportation experts throughout the world have been waiting for its release. 

The 2007 mobility report notes that congestion causes the average peak period traveler to spend an extra 38 hours of travel time and consume an additional 26 gallons of fuel, amounting to a cost of $710 per traveler.  Along with expanding the estimates of the effect of congestion to all 437 U.S. urban areas, the study provides detailed information for 85 specific urban areas.  The report also focuses on the problems presented by "irregular events"—crashes, stalled vehicles, work zones, weather problems and special events—that cause unreliable travel times and contribute significantly to the overall congestion problem.