Smart Cities Blog 1

Transportation: Smart Streets

By Young Na

So What is Smart City?

A smart city is a terminology that is constantly evolving with technological advancement, but in general, it is a city that utilizes the data gathered from monitoring all the critical city infrastructures to maximize the services that the city residents need in daily life.

Along with the industrial revolution, cities across the nation experienced significant expansion. As more people migrated to cities, each city had to develop a solution for maintaining public infrastructures to support sanitation, emergency services, and other needs we come across in daily life. As a result, cities began monitoring all of the crucial infrastructures closely to deliver all the required services. Hall (2000) noted that a city monitoring and integrating important city infrastructure conditions could optimize its residents’ services. By monitoring all the city infrastructures, including public roads, water management, power grid, and waste treatment, the city maximizes the services that the residents need in daily life.

Today, our cities are adopting smart technologies to improve city management through continuous monitoring with the help of numerous sensors. With the constant data gathered from smart sensors in city infrastructures, both the city and the residents of the city can boost the efficiency of the required services and conduct preventive maintenance economically.

 

What are Smart Streets?

Smart streets are streets that are designed for all types of users, including pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers, to use safely and efficiently with the help of cyber-physical systems. Lynn et al. (2020) define smart streets as cyber-physical investments to help meet a wide range of necessary objectives that the user of the street may encounter. Smart streets are a combination of traditional public street infrastructures and technological advancement with the help of internet connectivity. With the power of cyber-physical systems, streets and the surrounding infrastructures can become safer and more efficient than traditional streets. The real-time availability of street parking spots through Parkmobile in Bloomington is an excellent example of smart streets.

The goal of smart streets is the safety and efficiency of pedestrians, cyclists, motorists, and other types of users on the streets. Adopting cyber-physical systems reduces congestion and parking issues and mainly improves road management which correlates highly with enhancing safety. Therefore, the biggest benefit of smart streets is that cities can deliver real-time data of street conditions, which allows them to respond quickly if any street infrastructures require management or improvement. Continuous analysis of street condition help cities to maintain the road safer for all types of users. 

 

Smart City Projects

Smart Lighting Solution, St. Petersburg, Florida (St. Pete Innovation District)

In 2016, St. Pete Innovation District (SPID) was established in St. Petersburg, Florida. As part of the SPID initiative, the SPID began a project to transform the district into a smart city with four concept projects: Smart Lighting, Guardians of the Gulf (STEAM Education), Smart Intersection, and Digital Inclusion. As a result, the city utilized smart street lighting solutions with an emergency call box and multiple sensors, including an air quality and video sensor, so it could be flexibly controlled and collect critical street information.  

For the St. Petersburg part, I will only cover the smart lighting solution of the SPID initiative. 

Objectives

The objective of the SPID initiative to install a smart lighting solution is the city’s first step to solving local problems by developing technological applications for their infrastructures. SPID (2023) stated that smart lighting is the solution to one of the community challenges that the city face. By combining the city’s expertise and smart city infrastructure, SPID believed that the smart lighting project is one of the four best concept projects that they can address together as a community.

The project’s overall goal was a fundamental benefit of efficiencies and cost savings through the flexibility of controlling street lights and collecting data through embedded sensors. The solution helped pedestrians efficiently with necessary lights when needed but also provided traffic and crosswalk activity data to the city. 

Personal Thoughts

Street or outdoor lights activated by a video or motion sensor is very common across the world. However, what the SPID’s smart light project surprised me was the implementation of the data gathered from the smart lights. The city didn’t stop only at saving the cost of operating street lights but also took the data collected through multiple sensors to their next city planning. Additionally, the data from the street lights are available to local university students, who can combine the output data from other inputs to create a byproduct that can innovate the city in the future.    

Currently, St. Petersburg only installed four smart lights in the city as part of the proof of concept stage. Therefore, there isn’t much publicly available data showcasing the effectiveness of the smart lighting project as their smart city management tool. Hopefully, in the near future, the concept will receive successful validation and be adopted by multiple cities in the US.    

   

PrioBike-HH Bicycle Totem (Smart Bike Traffic Light), Hamburg, Germany

PrioBike-HH is a type of traffic light system that assists cyclists in reducing the waiting times at traffic stops and allows them to ride through an intersection without stopping (Ehlers et.al, 2022). The first smart bicycle traffic system prioritizes cyclists on the road when approaching an intersection, and several traffic lights will coordinate together to provide a green wave. The second smart bicycle traffic system guides cyclists with a speed advisory that they can follow to only hit green lights or reduce the waiting time at a traffic stop. Alternatively, cyclists can use the app to get the optimized speed advisory that they can follow to pass through an intersection without hitting the red light. 

Objectives

The objective of the PrioBike-HH Bicycle Totem and the app was to enhance the experience of the sustainable and environmentally friendly transportation method with increasing cycling comfort and safety. The overall goal was to increase the cycling infrastructure to promote cycling as the main method of transportation, which is cost and space efficient for both city and the residents of the city. 

The city of Hamburg believes that in order to achieve the best convenient experience for biking, eliminating the traffic stops at each intersection is the key. However, in the city where cyclists and motorists share the road together, adjusting traffic lights only for the bike was not a simple task. Therefore, the inner city has been adopting a green wave system, but it is yet under the design and development phase. Alternatively, the city came up with the idea of providing a green light optimal speed advisory (GLOSA) for cyclists to follow, which allows cyclists only to hit the green light at each intersection. Cyclists could achieve this optimal speed via two methods. The first is through the roadside speed advisory light. The second is the designated app that tracks and calculates the rider’s speed and provides GLOSA.

Personal Thoughts

Both types of smart street infrastructures that Hamburg suggested is a very effective ways to promote sustainable transportation methods. Especially in a very congested city, both suggested methods will increase the rideability of bikes as the main method of transportation. However, for a city that experiences heavy traffic, coordinating multiple traffic lights to provide a green wave is not feasible. Therefore, providing GLOSA is more suitable for many other cities. 

One thing that can improve the system is that only some bikes are equipped with a speedometer. Since GLOSA provides optimal speed in number, the information provided on the roadside traffic totem may need to be clarified. Therefore, an alternative way of informing their suggested speed may help improve the usability of the GLOSA system.

 

Prioritization System for Public Transport, Wallonia, Belgium

The prioritization system for buses and trams in Wallonia, Belgium, is a type of digital prioritization system that allows public transportation in the city to travel faster by prioritizing the traffic lights. As a result, public transportation, emergency vehicles, and other essential vehicles can reduce travel time, which reduces the cost of operation at the same time, shorten the ride time, which potentially could promote public transportation methods to the public.  

Objectives

The objective of the prioritization system for buses and trams is to reduce costs and add flexibility to mass transportation. The overall goal of the project is so that users of public transportation can experience shortened ride time and cost while using buses and trams. Additionally, the system could be implemented for emergency vehicles and any other essential vehicles so that citizens can receive the right service in time. 

Many cities promote the use of public transportation. However, there are not many advantages for the residents to utilize public transportation other than the cost efficiency. Therefore, adding the time efficiency aspect of mass transportation helps bring more residents to use buses and trams once the system becomes widely available in the city. 

 

Personal Thoughts

I believe that for those who live in a city where most residents own their personal vehicles, public transportation is not an ideal method of transportation. However, in many cases where the majority of residents use their personal car to commute, it often creates congestion. Therefore, implementing the prioritization system for buses could benefit the citizens who live in heavy traffic areas such as Atlanta or Chicago is an ideal method to solve the overall city congestion.

References

Ehlers, U., eheshti-Kashi, S., & Fröhlich, S. (2022, September 20). PrioBike-HH: Enhancing cycling comfort and safety in Hamburg, Interreg VB North Sea Region Programme. Bicycles and ITS. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://northsearegion.eu/bits/news/priobike-hh-enhancing-cycling-comfort-and-safety-in-hamburg/

Hall, R. E. (2000, September 28). The vision of a smart city. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Life Extension Technology Workshop. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/773961

Lynn, T., Rosati, P., & Fox, G. (2020). Smart Streets: Definition, Principles, and Infrastructural Elements. ICDS 2020: The Fourteenth International Conference on Digital Society, 74-83. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierangelo-Rosati/publication/346205531_Smart_Streets_Definition_Principles_and_Infrastructural_Elements/links/5fbcd322a6fdcc6cc65ebe6b/Smart-Streets-Definition-Principles-and-Infrastructural-Elements.pdf