Drivers of urban mobility

Drivers of urban mobility management

Advanced data analytics is the key to meeting the challenges of making our cities smarter, helping them become safer, less congested and more efficient for the future

Words | Ignasi Vilajosana, Worldsensing, Spain

By 2030 nearly five billion (61%) of the world’s 8.1 billion people will live in cities. To manage this rising tide, cities will need to respond to unexpected situations faster and manage congestion and inner-city traffic more efficiently than ever. Our ability to extract meaningful insights from data will transform urban mobility entirely, but to get there we need to build tools that enable real-time decision making.

Historically, city services such as traffic management and first responders have been reactive to disruptive events, without the means to plan proactively and foresee unexpected situations. Due to rising complexity in urban operations, cities must evolve from mere data collection and visualization, to decision-making support tools that recommend actions and show potential outcomes before critical events occur and operational decisions are made.

Here are three key drivers behind the adoption of new ways of managing mobility, in descending order of importance to city officials:

1. Safety and security

New geopolitical realities pose strong challenges regarding societal protection, stability and well-being. This has not gone unnoticed. Leaders are understanding that managing the mobility of individuals and identifying anomalous mobility patterns can also be a powerful tool in improving overall safety and security. Indeed, they can’t afford to risk citizens’ safety by implementing an imperfect solution. Therefore, urban leaders are also increasingly seeking solutions that facilitate citizen engagement, such the ability to report real-time incidents or give instant feedback to citizens. Important information already exists within traffic management systems such as traffic cameras, Bluetooth and wi-fi trackers, but siloed (self-contained) data centers offer limited visibility on such data, and solutions that provide more insights are necessary. You can’t make life-impacting decisions if you can’t see the full picture.

2. Urban mobility

Beyond safety concerns lies an emphasis on enhancements to city mobility. Mobility and urban parking management are crucial to managing economic development and the lifeblood of our cities: everyday transport systems bring people to work and to

socialize; vehicles deliver essential goods such as food, and carry away waste.

New mobility solutions and smart parking innovation will be critical to keeping our urban centers functioning. City managers face the challenge of dealing with increased density, more interactions, higher demand for transport, and potential security threats within the same budgets.

There’s a correlation between the importance of mobility solutions and city development. Emerging markets feature a rapidly growing middle class, producing a ‘congestion phenomenon’. More people can afford cars, placing unsustainable strain on outdated infrastructure. This is less pronounced in developed cities, where the gap between safety concerns and mobility demands has widened.

3. Economic impact

Close behind is the impact of new urban mobility solutions on city budgets. Reducing costs and creating more value is very important. Managing effi ciency is critical because many modern cities are far more accountable for budgeting than ever before. The rise of the smart city is in part due to city leaders seeking new solutions to this issue.

This last driver resonates strongly since city offi cials are ultimately accountable to their citizens. However, a mayor’s economizing won’t necessarily ensure re-election. What will get them elected is their improvements to everyday quality of life for citizens.

Conclusion

Today, cities need to manage growing complexity, denser populations and global talent attraction, while still ensuring the safety and well-being of all of their citizens. However, most cities face common inhibitors to effi cient urban operations: fragmented work processes, disconnected departments, and legacy systems with siloed data pools that do not intuitively link with one another. Breaking down these barriers will help urban managers to build the smarter cities of the future.

In response, over the past few years smart city solutions have fl ooded the market, mostly they are aggregating multiple sensor data and presenting it in graphical user interfaces that can be thought of as digital dashboards. While this illuminates decision-making, operators still suffer from what’s sometimes known as ‘swiveling chair syndrome’: a kind of ‘paralysis by analysis’ that happens when an individual is confronted with too much data for the human mind to process effectively.

To truly improve city operations, we must continue to create solutions that help city offi cials see the complete picture and enable real-time decision making. For traffi c fl ow management, smart parking, emergency and security response, and critical infrastructure monitoring, we must focus on building new solutions that connect sensor-based data, systems and people to generate real-time, geo-located insights. ■