City of Rochester USDOT Smart City Challenge $50M opportunity

[John Lam]

The City of Rochester plans to apply for the $40 + $10 million US Department of Transportation Beyond Traffic: The Smart City Challenge and invited a number of transportation-related organizations to contribute ideas for our City's application.

 

Cycling Alliance President Scott MacRae, Reconnect Vice-President DeWain Feller, and i participated in that Friday afternoon session of about 30 people. Crowd-sourcing ideas works better, though, with deeper and wider reach, and thus i write. The link above introduces the grant opportunity. If you so enjoy, please dig into the documents linked above and contribute ideas below.

 

The Challenge seems oriented toward automobiles. We have an opportunity to redress this and propose ideas more compatible with good land-use (less parking and sprawl). What's clear to me through the lens of history: innovation displaces the status quo: systems bearing innovation beat stagnant ones. Improvements, accommodations, and infrastructure for automobiles, as history shows, will likely yield more automobile traffic.

 

In addition, Monroe County's Intelligent Transportation System supports automobiles almost exclusively, yet 5% of respondents walked and up to 30 % walked to nearby destinations, according to a 2011 Genesee Transportation Council household travel survey. Better accommodations for pedestrians could encourage more people to walk, improving overall health, and yield capacity on local roads and parking by mitigating travel by car. That is, smart infrastructure for pedestrians could also support better transportation outcomes.

 

Smart lampposts could count pedestrians and enable detailed construction permitting. For example, construction had blocked or still blocks two segments of oft-used sidewalk, one along South Ave at Byron St (Pathstone building) and another along Alexander St (East House building). Yet at no time did the construction close the street to automobiles. Two lines of evidence, irregular semi-daily observation of snow tracks and informal visual counts, and Strava heatmaps show pedestrian detours around the construction. More people walk and run the eastern-side of the Genesee Riverway Trail than the alternative Wilson Blvd sidewalk, yet new City sidewalk plows deployed to clear the sidewalk, leaving the Riverway Trail unplowed for bicycles. Near real-time and detailed pedestrian counts could schedule plows according to need, support decisions for resource deployment and construction permitting, and improve social equity for pedestrians.

 

Another immense opportunity in urban automation and connected vehicles now rests with private owners and publicly-traded companies, such as Uber and Google. A huge opportunity gone unspoken, this challenge will create a body of technology, once open-source, perhaps enough to nudge an inflection point in the trajectory of development into the public realm. Imagine a project as significant as Android for cars or e-bikes. It is in part a fight for the control of the Application Programming Interfaces and the standards governing how things interact in cities and on highways for decades to come.

 

City Engineer Jim McIntosh also echoed an insight, one big idea or a synergy of ideas seems more likely to win than disconnected ideas, no better than the sum of their parts. To some degree, awarding the entire amount to one city yields such synergy, but synergy between system components also helps.

 

Please contribute your best ideas here. Though open only to cities with population between 200 000 and 850 000, please keep the Challenge and these ideas in confidence for Rochester until the Phase 1 deadline, February 4. Our project managers here asked for contributions by early Wednesday morning, but i plan to send the link above to our work-in-progress as early as Tuesday morning.

 

For questions not answered in any of the documents above, please reply to me and i will try to answer them in summary reply for everyone.

 

John