Smart Mobility today— a conversation with five cities

Q1: What is your vision of Smart Mobility?

Miami & Miami-Dade County

Miami-Dade County comprises 34 municipalities. Other than snow and slopes, the County has all the ecosystems and its unique transportation use cases. 

“Our vision for Smart Mobility is the ability to maximize our resources in a way that is aligned with our community goals. For example, there’s a lot of competing needs for the public right of way, and it is our responsibility to manage the lanes, the curb, the lights. The end goal is not just transportation for transportation's sake, but rather to achieve sustainability, maximize space, create impact to business and communities, and help people move faster.” 

Assistant Director of Transportation and Public Service Carlos Cruz-Casas says that the County has good quantitative data on throughput and travel times, and is focusing now on gathering more qualitative data from the community to better understand community needs and goals. The County received a grant from the Knight Foundation to have community members from four cities convey what types of transportation needs they have and how they prefer that to be solved. 

Separately, we spoke with Michelle Abbs, the Managing Director of Mana Tech, the technology-focused arm of Mana Common, a real estate platform that owns 50+ buildings in Miami’s Flagler District with a core focus on urban revitalization, sustainability, and community building. Mana Tech strategically recruits startups to work on key priorities at the city and county levels. In the last few years, there has been a thematic focus on Smart Cities, and Mana Tech has worked to recruit corporations to participate as partners and weave in startups from the Plug and Play community.

“Recently, Mayor Suarez met with Elon Musk, which began a conversation around thinking more futuristically and dreaming even bigger about the vision of Smart Mobility. 

We are starting to talk about the influx of thousands of people moving to Miami from other cities, and starting to talk about what that means in terms of moving people and goods. I’m pleased to see that we are dreaming bigger and exploring conversations around aerial mobility, point-to-point solutions, kiosk integrations, street management, and better utilization of our greatest asset—the water.”

Chicago (City Tech Collaborative)

For Chicago, we connected with David Leopold at City Tech Collaborative, a member-driven consortium and 501(c)(3) organization that creates cross-sector teams from industry, academia, and government to develop solutions to urban challenges including mobility, health, and infrastructure. In 2019, the Collaborative launched its Advanced Mobility Initiative (AMI), and for the last two years has been in progress with 16 projects spanning 70 partners that address mobility challenges. 

“For AMI, our vision is a more seamless, connected, accessible, and far-reaching transportation system for all people and goods that move about the city. We’ve seen that there has not been an appetite for a single private or public sector actor to manage and control an integrated transportation system, resulting in gaps that can be detrimental to the user experience. Where a lot of our work has focused is on smoothing out the transitions between modes through solutions that enable better collaboration between partners and making their data more shareable, systems more interoperable, and business models more open.”

Columbus

In 2016, Columbus won the hotly contested Smart Cities competition among U.S. cities for a $50 million award from the U.S. DOT and the Paul Allen Family Foundation. As part of the Smart Columbus program, the City deployed a broad portfolio of emerging mobility technologies including connected vehicles, two autonomous shuttles, mobility hubs, bike share, and a number of applications tailored to specific needs such as non-emergency transport. We connected with Mandy Bishop, the Deputy Director of Public Service and Smart Columbus Program Manager.

“As for what Smart Mobility vision looks like, we have succeeded in deploying smart mobility when everyone has equitable transportation options.

Have we reached it? No.

It’s an ongoing process, and the way that we are measuring improvement is to look at what our transportation enables: how many jobs, education opportunities, and healthcare services do we put in reach.”

San Diego

San Diego has been a hot market for new mobility technology, with deployments of shared bikes and scooters, neighborhood shared electric vehicles, ADA accessibility, and circulators that supplement the transit system. They are even keeping an eye on the developing technologies associated with autonomous vehicles and aerial mobility with their regional partners. Looking forward, San Diego is moving forward with a competitive RFP to get a mixed fleet of shared mobility devices—scooters, e-bikes, cargo bikes, adaptive scooters—that can increase mobility options with the newest technology for operator partners and their users to get around the city, says City of San Diego Director of Mobility and Sustainability Department Alyssa Muto. 

“For Smart Mobility—from a functional perspective, there need to be available and accessible transportation options that are real alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles for different lengths and trip types, with a key focus on underserved communities. 

From a technology perspective, it’s about having data and performance indicators that can help us innovate in the right direction. For example, Smart Mobility data can help us understand if a certain corridor is a lead corridor for getting from one neighborhood to another via a scooter or bike and requires attention to improve on safety or the user experience.”

Reno (Nevada Center for Applied Research)

For Reno, we chatted with Carlos Cardillo, Director of Nevada Center for Applied Research (NCAR), a University of Nevada, Reno research and development center sponsored by the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development that creates technologies and innovation through partnerships between industry, startups, and university students and professors. Three years ago, NCAR established Intelligent Mobility intending to develop projects using the triple helix model of innovation: a collaboration between government, industry, and university.



“A few years ago, we had an excellent meeting in Las Vegas with stakeholders regarding the grand vision of the Intelligent Mobility initiative. While keeping an eye on the grand vision, we decided we needed to start small and create a tangible project. The project we decided on was mass-transit automation, where we took a Proterra electric bus operated by the Washoe County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) and instrumented it with a suite of sensors, lidar, camera, GPS, and computing platform (all of the technology that goes into autonomous vehicles). The objective is to collect data and better understand how the fusion of technology behaves under various environmental conditions, for example, if sensors lose accuracy in 100-degree weather, can camera/lidar/radar take over as backup? In parallel with the electric bus instrumentation, we are also piloting connected traffic signals and exploring the legal/regulatory and socioeconomic impact of this program.”

Read the full article at Mobitas Advisors.