Smarter Cities

I am not really involved in my city.  I would like to be.  I could read the local newspaper, but we take a national edition.  I would like to know whats going on that I could act on.  RSS or Twitter feeds are pretty much push solutions, and not really used by most citizens.    How about a simple scrolling list of events and local news where on a TV, or internet phone, SMS, and maybe even paper mail forms, where you get some info on an event or local issue, plus two check boxes: one that its something of long term interest you want to keep hearing about (local blues band events), or its of short term interest (how to start a business seminar).  You reply, and the list is tuned to include, at the top, more focused information of value… this I can scan in 5 minutes a week, and know what more my city can do for me, and I for my city.

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Why focus on managing and charging cars, when you can remove half the problem or more by using bikes?  Less cars, and you can use more of the streets for bike paths. Then use smarter traffic solutions for smarter bike solutions too keep things moving and safe too.  Support electric bikes which demand less of the existing grid than electric cars when charging.  Subsidize local designers and manufactures to make better bikes, bikes for couples, bikes for small shipments, dry-in-the-rain bikes… Make bikes cool.  People will be healther, have prettier legs,  and probably get to work quicker.  It can work.

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via calstart.org

For more on the TwitStop project for the convoy, see the Smarter Planet Blog: http://www.asmarterplanet.com

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smarterplanet:

On Tuesday, Oct. 27th, a convoy of dozens of hybrid trucks will be rolling through Atlanta on their way to the  Hybrid Truck 2009 National Conference at the Georgia World Congress Center.  As part of the conference, IBM will also be publishing its new study, Truck2020, which examines the critical role that next generation trucking will play in making cities, supply chains, retail businesses and many aspects of our planet smarter, greener and more innovative.

Speaking of next generations,  many kids ( and plenty of grownup kids) love trucks. To feed that passion and promote interest in this emerging high-tech industry, IBM’s Institute for Business Value, which produced the Truck2020 report, is organizing a multimedia collaboration via Twitter for spectators and convoy participants. We’re calling it a “TwitStop.” See details on how people in the Atlanta area can be part of this social media mashup.

Trucks, Technology & Twitter: the Atlanta Hybrid Truck Convoy and the Truck2020 TwitStop

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Why do we need hybrid trucks? Just think about how often a garbage truck stops, starts and waits idling.

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Just sharing a link to a story in the NYT this morning…some discussion of variable pricing for the subway.

I’m the inventor of new ways that generate clean electric power for vehicles and other uses. I have many designs that are new products and improvements on old products. My inventions all have the one thing that is missing from all other products they are self sustained by their own power.

I have a system and method of using the power that normally is not used. We create lots of power but we only know how to use one tenth of it. By showing the design faults in today’s products we will begin to use the power that’s missing. Proper use of power. The right use of power will sustain it’s self. The wrong use of power it depletes. It’s simple.

We make more power than we know how to use. If we used it right we wouldn’t need so much. Just know that we have the technology and the use of fossil fuel is at it’s end. There is no way to sustain this misuse of power.

To have a smart Grid you must have smart power. A smart grid with not so smart power don’t really make senes? Do it? I know that we don’t have smart power yet. But it won’t be long. Help me put power on the right track by your support for my designs. thank you!

I really need to get patent searches and patented. Individual inventors don’t have money to do the legal work that needs to be done. Because of this it stops progress that we need. I have a design that uses it’s own power” selfsustaining power ” . That’s what you are looking for? If every type of vehicle had this design we would not need fossil fuels. With my designs you don’t need some programs to advance clean coal or other fossil fuels. Millions spent on past tech? I need less than 10,000 to start the futore of clean electrical power cheap for everyone to use. Let us get it right this time. Talk to who ever will help. abufreepower@aol.com

Link below describes a recent piece of research that demonstrates innovative approach to fighting the growing problem of mutating infections like MRSA in hospitals and other buildings…..People will never wash their hands enough to eliminate infection so ….build self-disinfecting environments…HOW?….see link below…

http://www.dit.ie/hothouse/technologiestolicense/available%20for%20license/industrial%20technology/anti-bacterial%20powder/

To create smarter cities and their inhabitants, it is evident that there has to be larger area coverage of enhanced high-bandwidth broadband systems.  IBM’s “Smarter Cities” concept will be facilitated  by the sharing of information and data by new, innovative, reliable and affordable communication systems.  SkyPipes Wireless is such a system, patented in the U.S. and several foreign countries which is preparing for its first full-scale telecom market deployment in 2010.

The global community of individuals, businesses and government agencies is dependent on the Internet for e-mail communication, transaction facilitation, entertainment and data transfer.  More and more users are requiring faster Internet access for an increasing number of applications like IPTV and two-way video communications and collaboration.  These sophisticated applications will demand an order-of-magnitude bandwidth increase for HD television, movie, video and music programming with a “random access – anything at any time” format.  TV will cease to be TV as we have known it and will become a high definition, two-way interactive learning and entertainment medium.  Think of it as “You Tube on steroids.”  The biggest remaining obstacle to achieving this transformation is widely available and affordable high-capacity, last-mile bandwidth connections like SkyPipes.

The big advantages of radio-wave transmission systems would be many including:

·         Higher reliability during storms, fires, earthquakes and other emergencies

·         Less environment damage and material consumption per subscriber than buried cable

·         Wider bandwidth of up to 20 - 40 mbps

·         Access to infinite Internet distributed content at high-definition, wide screen quality

·         Two-way interactive, video communication for distance learning and collaboration

·         Lower costs and potentially lower subscription rates providing wider market access

·         Cost effective way to provide a nationwide broadband system covering 90+% of

populated or highway areas for hundreds of millions of dollars, instead of billions

·         Specialty applications including; rapid deployment post-disaster networks, energy

consumption control, and rural last mile super broadband service delivery

Until now, “broadband” has been defined as 1.5 to 3 megabits per second.  To achieve the above vision it must be redefined as at least 20 megabits per seconds in both directions.  In 2008, 55% of U.S. households were subscribers to broadband services and according to “Broadband Forum” there were over 300 million broadband subscribers worldwide as of first quarter, 2009.  The largest global broadband usage regions were Western Europe with 108 million subscribers, South and East Asia with 99 million and North America with 93.5 million.

In urban areas (smart cities) in the U.S., 92% of subscribers receive their broadband link from buried cable and DSL communication lines.  In suburban areas this percentage drops to 79%. In rural areas where installing and operating buried cable systems is far less economical, they deliver broadband to only 74% of the total subscribers with many prospects not having broadband access.

The SkyPipes radio based, high-bandwidth broadband system will transmit for distances of up to 3 miles to the first node and then be retransmitted through or around obstacles to up to three total nodes.  Each system hub or “Anchor Point” will serve up to 450 subscribers and cover an area of up to 45 sq. miles.  Besides typical telecom and/or TV subscription services, this system can provide dedicated communication channels for local area networks like college campuses, corporate or industrial sites, solar or wind turbine monitoring systems, dedicated communication links for police, fire, government and contractor services in the event of a large disaster anywhere in the world.  Ultimately, the SkyPipes Wireless system will be ideal for transmitting data to and from IBM Analytic Centers from a variety of sources.  For further information please visit www.skypipeswireless.com

Large organizations - governments, financial companies, transit systems, utilities - are deploying lots of new information infrastructures to support smart city applications. But all too often, they have a limited imagination to what these systems should be used for, and try to exercise too much control over access to their data.

On the other hand, the web and open mobile platforms are creating a rich ecosystem of bottom-up apps that do things people actually want to do, and are building user bases and functionality organically, all the while delicately stitching themselves into the existing social and spatial fabric of cities.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the way these two parallel technology tracks can be connected together than FourTap, an elegant integration of a top-down system for transit payments (London’s Oyster RFID Card) and a bottom-up system for mobile social networking (Foursquare - and here’s a recent NY Times article explaining the service). Watch the video below, it doesn’t take long to get the point.

The implications:

• Expose data from top-down platforms to enable innovation
• Amplify the scale and impact of bottom up services by leveraging open, centralized megainfrastructures

FourTap - Checking in to Foursquare using an Oystercard from danw on Vimeo.

All our ideas are around CIW and 911 solutions, but cities are moving faster, including this kind of concepts.

Crime prevention through environmental design is a multidisciplinary approach to reducing crime through environmental design.

A few weeks ago I thought about the idea of creating peer groups of cities that band together to share ideas, data, and ultimately analytics to make them smarter individually and collectively. I was inspired by the work IBM is doing in Dubuque, and later by what I saw at the Smarter Cities event in NYC.

Tonight, I started to think about what the connections between these cities might look like and how the collaboration process might evolve. I decided that I should post a draft model and open it up for discussion rather than wait until I had a fully baked, hence this note. (You can register for the site and respond, or email me at info@sig411.com)

I’ll use the term citiplex to refer to such a community of cities, with similarities in several of the following basic properties:

• Population size (similar educational, safety and healthcare issues)
• Population density (similar housing and transportation issues)
• Climate (energy requirements) o Natural resources (agricultural potential, energy sources…)
• Government (easier for culturally similar groups to make a conscious effort to share)

Adrian Bowles, SIG411

Usually we see consumers as passive buyers, reacting to advertising, and choosing from the available products in the market and we expect producers to make statistics of their sales in order to understand what people wants to buy.

Now, by using web tools, it would be quite easy to create communities of consumers that work together designing the products they would like to buy. These communities could for instance imagine possible new features to a HiFi set, or modify the design of a sport shoe. Then, these features and products could been voted by everyone, so the fittest could be potential new products that can be materialized by manufacturers interested in it. Consumers would obtain products more adapted to their needs and producers would have new products that are supported by many potential buyers. If a consumer is involved in the development of a product, surely he would like to buy it and promote it.

The idea is simple, yet powerful, since it opens a new communication channel between consumers and producers.

A Smarter City would use community-accessible data visualization to illustrate tradeoffs involved in important debates about land use.  Community input could then be based on facts rather than rhetoric and opinion from opposing sides. In this case in Durham NC, a privately commissioned land survey was used to justify removing buffer protections from a lake that supplies water to the region.  It is too hard for an ordinary citizen to know what is the truth: was the land survey correct? will the revised watershed boundary adversely affect water quality? will the development provide badly needed jobs? Better access to data, modeled and visualized so everyone can understand the data, would inform the community debate.

From the Herald Sun Oct 13
Board votes to end N.C. 751 protection

Durham County Commissioners voted 3-2 this week to remove watershed-buffer protection from a 165-acre site along N.C. 751 next to Jordan Lake.  The decision followed a lengthy public hearing and debate about whether environmental or economic interests should control the decision. A Raleigh developer wants to use the site for development; on the other side are concerns about impact on the regional watershed.

Durham, N.C., USA.  land use, watershed, debate, community, data, visualization, facts, environment

“New York has been a pioneer among cities in the use of computing firepower to sift through data to improve services. It began in the 1990s with the city’s CompStat system for mapping, identifying and predicting crime. The system, combined with new policing practices, reduced crime rates in New York and was later adopted by Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other cities.

In 2002, the city began its “311” telephone number for answering questions about government services and to report problems down to missing manhole covers. The service receives 50,000 calls a day, and earlier this year began operating on the Web as well. Complaints, response times and resolved problems are tracked and measured to improve performance.

In 2006, the city began an online service, NYC Business Express, to make it easier and faster to start a business. The average time to obtain a building permit, for example, has been cut to 7 days from 40. Such seemingly mundane improvements can add up to big gains in the efficiency of government service systems, experts say, nurturing productivity and growth in local economies. The process, they say, is similar to “lean manufacturing,” a system first mastered by Toyota in which step-by-step changes on the factory floor, made repeatedly, translate into major advances in quality and productivity.”

NY Times, Steve Lohr  Oct. 10th

A city is not some abstract organizational entity, but rather the most massive social organization we create (well, at least until the Web came along).  So what does a Smarter City mean to the legendary “man on the street”?  How does an intelligence environment benefit him or her?  How does he or she interact with this intelligence?

Information Technologies can do two main things:  enable the flow of information and aggregate information.  Information flows in Smarter Cities are both horizontal (P2P) and vertical (P2C).  How does the co-existence of these sets of flows change the way that cities operate?

For example, how does this complement traditional democracy?  Can it enable “micro-governance” in which quarters, districts, even streets have more direct control over “how the city works”?

That’s a lot of questions.  And that’s where we start.  Do you have answers?

Dr. Colin Harrison
Director,  IBM Corporate Strategy
Smarter Cities

At our design firm we always wanted a way to get in touch with other people who work in the same building or next door for collaboration or conversation so we built a web tool called STACKD. So far 15 buildings have joined in New York City. This is a network whose commonality is driven by location based on the idea that being in the same place means you have similar needs. You can read more about it on Urban Omnibus: a publication focused on how cities are changing.