Comparison of Smart Cities Songdo / Milton Keynes / Rio de Janiero

Milton Keynes is a young, planned town.  It is interesting that such a young town still faces infrastructure challenges from population growth.  Milton Keynes is the base for The Open University and relatively close to Cambridge.  It's little surprise to find it taking a technological and academic perspective in understanding what it means to be a Smart City.  

Songdo is a completely top-down smart city, its greenfield construction has allowed an emphasis on civic infrastructure, for example waste disposal and communication.  Yet, surprisingly, mention is already made of shortcomings in transportation and slow take-up in occupancy.  Is this simply a matter of time for people to get used to the idea of this new place?  Is it simply a matter of waiting until cost pressures or infrastructure issues push people and businesses out from Seoul itself?   Or does this point to a human factor in occupation - a Smart City can be efficient and functional, but that may not be enough for people to choose to live there.  As a relatively new development, the outcome is yet to be seen.

Rio de Janiero is the most interesting case, where both top-down and bottom-up activities are in play, it is a massive city with widely recognised problems in transportation, power and water infrastructure and in social and economic measures.

The bottom up approaches are easily cast as the underdogs, achieving useful results and minimal cost. But perhaps that perception comes because they had no burden of expectations and no targets to achieve.  It would take some careful review to compare the actual impact of the city's Operations Centre with the impact of the UNICEF mapping program.

My working theory is that bottom-up and top-down have their place.  Bottom up can achieve 'quick-and-dirty' results, alleviating immediate pressures and also serving as a prototyping platform.  But the core of transportation, power and water infrastructure requires real civil construction, with substantial investment and timeframes involved. We need to be smarter about what is constructed and how it is operated, but we can't build infrastructure the same way that we can build smartphone apps.  Lastly, the bottom-up approaches allow people to connect and collaborate to provide the flexibility that prevents cities being stunted by overly prescriptive plans.  it is worth noting that purely social bottom-up programs can be successful, but many more can flourish if enabled by high availability of smartphones and mobile data communications.

Why have I moved from looking at Transportation to looking at Smart Cities?

Transportation is being revolutionised, you might say 'democratised', by the same tools that have transformed banking, travel, retail and navigation: ubiquitous data communication, cheap mobile processing power and rapid development of software. This is software that not only provides information to users, but also solicits and acquires data from them. 

Journey planning (across multiple modes) and more responsive ride-hailing and ride sharing services are here. 

Historically, traffic and transport management was centralised in systems that were tightly controlled and high integrity.   But often they rely on data that was intended for other purposes. For example, existing rail systems track the movement of trains using the same systems that were designed to protect them from collisions. 

But the characteristics that make the system safe often do not making the data available quickly and to the desired precision and certainly cannot be modified quickly. In contrast, smart transport harnesses multiple sources of data, understands the flaws of that data and has the mechanisms to qualify that data. The holders of the centralised data sources are realising the benefit to passengers of making their controlled data available to developers of smart applications. 

Beyond all this, the biggest challenge in smart transportation infrastructure is that transport infrastructure, such a railway line, typically takes 20 years to plan, ten years to build and has a design life of 50-100 years. By comparison, the first generation iPhone was released in 2007, Uber started in 2009 and was released internationally only in 2012.

We face a real challenge in predicting
the transportation needs over even
a tenth of our our planning horizon. 

We face a real risk of building monumental white elephants; but we cannot afford to do nothing. 

In many places, surveys show that road traffic is greater on a Saturday than on the weekday peaks as people attend multiple activities including shopping and entertainment.  But these activities themselves are changing dramatically through online services. 

Road users in most cities feel the change in traffic levels at the start of each new school term, but my own children have already carried out many years of their high school education online, while enrolled at school in another country. 

By understanding more about how cities are becoming smarter, I want to look for lessons in making transportation smarter, but also to look for those indicators about how the requirements for transportation could change. 

Smart Transportation can help us build transportation right; understanding Smart Cities will help us build the right transportation.