With Smart Cities, You Might Not Have to Ditch Your Car
Technology is becoming increasingly integrated into daily life, making a variety of tasks much less time consuming or tedious. We are expanding the frontier of what’s possible, such as Amazon’s cashierless shops that use AI to track your cart as you pick items from shelves, and then bill your account the correct price (read more here: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011). Personal digital assistants (i.e.: asking Siri, Alexa, or Google to control aspects of our house, call family members, or sometimes play our favorite song) and this technology has the potential to benefit everybody no matter their specific needs, wants, or interests, extending beyond just our homes and cell phones.
Take for example the Tragedy of the Commons, a classic theory exhibiting what happens when a shared space is used by many, all of whom fail to recognize the devastating impact the collective has on said space. Sure, one person’s actions are not the driving factor in destroying the commons, but everybody acting in the same way with no care for the common good may have a devastating impact. Sad, yes, but the same theory can be applied in the opposite way. Imagine everybody utilizes a shared space (the internet) and contributes in such a way that any and everybody benefits. This exists, and it is called the Internet of Things (IoT). It is, however, important to note that the Internet of Things is not perfect and does have its flaws just like the internet we use every day; but just like the world wide web, the IoT can contribute great benefits to our society.
The Internet of Things’ purpose can be explained simply as “[enabling] various objects and entities to communicate with each other through the internet” (Ellsmoor, 2019). Amsterdam, for example, has implemented IoT to monitor traffic flow, utility usage, and police activity to better inform these sectors on how to improve. Barcelona made similar investments, and saved €75 million while creating over 47,000 technology-related jobs. Boston has trash bins that allow sanitation officials to monitor their capacity levels remotely, and then plan more efficient pick-up routes to empty the bins. The Internet of Things and the concept of smart cities (cities that implement the Internet of Things to monitor and better control the actions within themselves) can be extremely powerful and can do great things to make habitability much more comfortable and accessible (Ellsmoor, 2019).
An increasing topic in cities is transportation. Roads are congested, train infrastructure in the U.S. is incredibly subpar, and cities are nearly un-bikeable. Enter: the Internet of Things, and recall Amsterdam’s traffic flow monitoring. Surely, the Dutch government could send apps such as Google Maps or Waze traffic data and recommend routes to avoid congestion, but that still leaves room for human error. Traffic apps only work if everyone is using them. However, with an increasing amount of GPS and internet-enabled vehicles on the road, we can incorporate IoT directly into cars, buses, and all other vehicles to not only better predict their actions, but also plan what they should do next. This concept is called the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and is the foundation for something called Vehicular Social Networks (or VSNs) (Ning et al, 2017).
With VSNs, vehicles can communicate with the network, and therefore each other, their respective location, speed, direction, and next moves. With all cars on the road receiving and sending this data, vehicles can best plan routes to their destination and avoid congestion. Reducing road congestion can then lead to improved air quality and improve emergency vehicle response times and efficiency. The issue of trust with such a system sharing such private and detailed information is tough and will take time. There is no easy way to gain a full society’s trust, but once this concept is more normalized and is accepted by the younger generations, VSNs can truly take off and greatly improve the way cities move (Ning et al, 2017). Granted, it is not likely that there will ever be unanimous support for VSNs and the specific details will need to be worked through with the general population in order to gain support.
In an opinion piece from Smart Cities World, writer Adam Cohen argues that smart cities and the integration of IoT into transportation can provide for a more efficient and effective transportation network. Real-time updates and more detailed information about system statuses, in Cohen’s mind, will help customers make more efficient transit choices. This could be realized in planning routes, estimating departure and arrival times, andeven ditching the car for public transportation. Cohen also mentions the concepts of shared mobility and microtransit; claiming that this increased connectivity and easier access to different modes of transportation will increase usage of bike, car, and scooter shares to move people around cities more efficiently (Cohen, 2019.) With the integration of VSNs and shared mobility, we can connect every person in the city, and avoid the hours-long traffic jams which waste time and resources.
Smart cities don’t just happen overnight. A lot of city infrastructure is old and would need to be retrofitted to even accept such new technology. Additionally, cities change so fast in this current age that the technology implemented now needs to be future-proofed so as not to go obsolete within a short period of time. With much more planning, experimenting, and research, smart cities can soon become a social norm and allow us all to live more efficient lives.Ultimately, we will spend more time where time matters most: home.
Works Cited
Cohen, A. (2019, July 12). How technology will shape transportation in smart cities. Retrieved from: https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/opinions/opinions/how-technology-will-shape-transportation-in-smart-cities
Ellsmoor, J. (2019, May 19). Smart cities: The future of urban development. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/05/19/smart-cities-the-future-of-urban-development/#774ec77e2f90
Ning, Z., Xia, F., Ullah, N., Kong, X., & Hu, X. (2017). Vehicular social networks: Enabling smart mobility. IEEE Communications Magazine, 55(5), 16–55. doi: 10.1109/mcom.2017.1600263
