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.