The sky is clearing...... How do we understand the new normal?..............

Until recently there has been a clear divide between data collected on transport through roadside surveys and the data from within the vehicles themselves. City authorities have had separate strategies for gathering their own data primarily by employing professional engineering consultants to gather further insight, which is often highly reliant on transport models, with very limited data gathering taking place. In the current new world we find ourselves living in this has been compounded in ways that no one could have foreseen. The emergence of the internet, GPS, 4/5G and IoT technologies is rapidly blurring the lines and making legacy techniques near impossible and statistically irrelevant. Now could be the time to adjust the focus and switch to big data, which is captured for public good and is statistically valid. 

There has always been an alternative world whereby the majority of data is captured commercially by platform companies and used purely to advance their own agendas. This will lead to a society where most smart city data will be unavailable to cities or regions and not used in a socially responsible way.

In the digital age, big data is the new electricity that powers a city. Citi Logik is working to help local authorities and others better understand citizens’ journeys and build overall patterns of movement. It’s no longer about individuals answering questions at the side of the road to a council representative armed with clipboards; it’s about harnessing the existing 3/4/5G network to understand demand patterns and multi modal movement.

The best examples of the use of data-powered solutions are emerging in cities that are forward thinking and well organised. The most obvious example is Singapore, which has a focused plan for the use of 5G and IoT technologies. Less well known are the smaller cities which are just as well organised but with clear agendas around modal shift and healthier living. Cities such as Manchester and Hull are focused on addressing the need for modal shift to healthier forms of transport. The benefits will be in increased economic activity (through data), reductions in pollution and the greater use of public transport.  

But it’s not the eye-catching initiatives that matter. It’s much more about getting the basics right such as understanding how train stations are used, the impact of park and ride on a city, the key interchange points across the city and how people optimise choices on a daily basis. 

If we look at the sharing economy, there are different ways of doing things. The use of the existing infrastructure, which we’re all paying for, is critical. And it’s a critical part of the city: reusing the data from existing infrastructure is really important.

The most contentious example is when a device is placed on a street where there is a Wi-Fi connection which is picking up signals from people passing by without their agreement. These sorts of things are not really appropriate in today’s world. The whole approach is about doing it in a way that gets the buy-in of not only the local authority itself, but also of the people who vote them into office.

The awareness of what’s going on right now and what the issues are – relating to what is called journey time reliability, or how consistently you can travel from A to B – is critical to changing that. But most importantly, the process is evidential: with the right information, councils can easily explain and prove to their residents why they are making certain decisions / changes around road usage.

If you’re going to do something better, faster and cheaper, you have to start with the better. The ‘better’ is quality, and statistically significant data volumes. The ‘faster’ is that it’s a much more non-intrusive collection of data using existing infrastructure, which is clearly more efficient and better for society – you’re not putting large amounts of sensors on the streets or anything of that nature. The ‘cheaper’ is providing something to a local authority that it would not otherwise have been able to afford. For example, data around car parking – one of the biggest contributors to congestion if not optimised properly – helps us to understand where people travelled for work and retail; where they started and ended their journey; and how they changed transport modes along the way.

This is now, not in 10 years...

The urban landscape will be changing and big data might just be the solution. The way people are moving right now has and will fundamentally change. The classic view of commuting to work – living in one place, working in another, and repeating that routine five days a week – is no longer a truism, with people now working from different locations and spending their time fundamentally differently to the way they did even just three months ago. Designing an effective connectivity strategy that accurately caters to the transport needs of those who move through the city poses one of the greatest challenges. Relying on existing data – often collected manually through roadside surveys – to make decisions about roadworks, highway planning, traffic flows and even cycle lanes will prove to be costly and statistically unreliable. As a result, the urban environment is no longer what we imagined it to be: the movement patterns of the citizens of today are practically unrecognisable. Understanding what their behaviour looks like and the dynamics of how a city lives and moves in the new world is a wholly new challenge.

Although transport is the chief area to benefit from this work, it’s not the only target. The next major stepping stone is urban planning – determining what a commercial developer needs to contribute to a local environment, and how it will impact the existing landscape – followed by public inquiries and service provision. Healthcare provision is the most obvious: if you can understand the journeys of everyone trying to get to a major healthcare facility, such as a hospital, then you can optimise the movements to those places. That’s really important, because if you want to put in Park & Ride schemes and understand the provision of services into the city, you need to help the city understand itself first.

Data is an area of expertise, and you need people to focus on it just like with any other core service. Ultimately, councils and regions should be working with people who can add value to their core mission. They should be spending their time on the policy making, rather than necessarily creating data themselves.

For further information please visit www.citilogik.com