One of 31 factors in the European smart cities
model is “Sustainable, innovative and safe transport systems” with 3
indicators. It is definitive that to sustain the economy of any city, transport
becomes a critical backbone. And it is surprising that projects are taken to
build Greenfield smart cities, that to work on existing megacities improving
their efficiency, since it is easy to build from scratch that to retrofit a
city. But urban planners, miss the point of breakeven with infrastructure, they
don’t consider it critical, as if citizen money is their property to plan in
any way required. They also have to consider that if the existing cities are
made efficient and attractive to businesses, then there will be orders of
magnitude more growth than in a city built from scratch, just due to the
availability of profitable consumer base. To start I would provide the concept
of a Brownfield project, that will start giving returns immediately in smart
transport. let check our expectations on Transport. basically as a commuter, I should
be able to reach from my source to destination in the same time and same cost
24X7, and should potentially be shortest for that distance. This is closely
represented by point to point airline networks across the globe. If you feel
that such road planning is hard, please use Physarum ( algae ), modelling for
natural optimization of roads and mass transit networks which can be used to
model with the constraints of existing cities while unique constraints of the
planned new city. The next factor is sustainability. The basic policy
requirement, that any private automobile should be zero emission should suffice
for the city, as a hub for clean technology like fuel cell, or high density
batteries for electric transport. so we essentially did a small policy change
for reducing the co2 footprint of the city. When also highlighted the need of
road and mass transit optimization. Good to ask but hard to solve. How can we
do it? There are few steps that can help do it while adding intelligence to the
transport system for traffic control and predictive analytics for further planning.
Cities are about people. They first question we should ask is what are the real
commute demographics compared to one we think we know. The best attempt made so
far is by MIT human dynamics lab by mining Mobile Call Log with the respective
locations that the mobile were in different part of day in weeks. They efficiently
found true communities as represented in the book social physics. This is the
first step in planning transport, since communities have specific transport
needs. E.g. By profession. How do we then mine their needs, by time spent at a
location over a period of 6 months. These two factors needs continuous
monitoring to update the public hotspots in the city, while drilling down for community
hotspots. This can be used for creating a hub and spoke road/massive transport
model, with spokes under 10 min walkable distances. The road and massive
transit will be linked tightly together, then the choice for a massive transit
hub vs a road hub is basically a function of headcount commuting between
points.
So let recap the discussion above with few more
insights.
1.
Change policy for only allowing zero
emission private vehicles in the city, and plan for Zero emission public vehicles.
2.
Mine Call log for Real city
demographics.
3.
Identify public and community hotspots.
4.
Use the identified public and community
hotspots, and filter by forecasted commuting density over next 10 years.
5.
Use physarum to model both mass transit
and road networks, one unconstrained and then by iteratively enforcing them by
the effort to overcome it in ascending order, since we know, no constraints is
optimal for building these infra, but adding constraints we want to reach a
point, where the total cost of development with constraints is significantly
exceed greenfield development.
Then we think about traffic control, which needs to be equally
efficient, and enable safety. With sensors getting smaller every day, a smart
number plate is what I think about for every vehicle in the transport ecosystem,
what do we need in there, few from my wish list :
1.
GPS with Glonass.
2.
Dual Camera at the length ends of the plates for
3D vision.
3.
Quad Core Digital signal processor for different
tasks.
4.
Accelerometer.
5.
Gyroscope.
6.
Magnetometer.
7.
3G Connection for data transfer.
8.
Weight sensor.
9.
Auto Emotive for Driver.
How does this help.
1.
GPS with Glonass will give :
a. Precise
position of the vehicles, directing the change in traffic signs.
b. Precise
speed information for Law enforcement.
2.
Positioning with 3D vision will allow Law enforcement
to be semi-automated for certain tasks like :
a. Pollution (
if you choose not to enforce zero emission vehicles )
b. Speeding.
c. Signal
Violation.
d. Using the
trajectory to infer offender in accidents.
e. To plan for
Incident response in critical traffic blocks, and penalize drivers, e.g. if there
is a fight between drivers blocking a major road in peak hours.
3.
The weight sensor is used to cut ignition if the
vehicle is taking more than recommended load, similar to stopping lifts with
alarms.
The Sensor information will augment the Demographic information, for
improved planning. And the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and auto
emotive with the Positioning data can used to create accurate pay per mile
insurance models, with insurance proportional to the driving quality. Do let me
know your thoughts.
