Gordon Feller examines how two cities in Nevada are benefiting from being able to plug in to their technology partner’s existing infrastructure and platforms to ignite smart city innovation.
Cities have struggled mightily during the pandemic. They worked to contain Covid’s job-destroying blows to local economies and the budget-busting impacts of shutdowns, all while conducting a frontline fight against the virus. Public health systems were ramped up; mass transit systems saw ridership and revenues plummet.
It’s not a surprise that elected and appointed city executives now look forward to a trillion-dollar opportunity that might come from new federal infrastructure funds. A growing chorus of city managers are discussing how to ensure that these funds, when signed into law by resident Biden, get used by their jurisdictions in ways that go beyond traditional spending on roads, bridges, and tunnels.
In her April 2021 MIT Technology Review essay, Jennifer Clark accurately describes “What cities need now.” She’s a professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State, and the author of the book Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities. Clark argues that “a viable future for smart city technology would mean engaging with tough questions that the tech sector has often avoided – questions about what advances would best serve cities as such”.
New approach
A new approach taken by some smart city projects aims to demonstrate how sharing infrastructure and data can empower a community to make more informed choices and decisions. At the heart of most such projects are sensors, and the data streaming from them into the cloud.
Such data is the new energy that gives cities the power to drive innovation. In the near-term future, urban infrastructure relies upon the rapid analysis of data relayed from buildings, streets and other transport assets, and grids. On the road to that future the primary purpose of successful smart city initiatives has been relatively simple: enabling city authorities to make better decisions about critical changes in real-time.
The foundation of this new approach to the smart city includes not just applications and the platform, but also responsive local governance, unified public-private partnerships, and flexible smart city systems. These elements, working together, are what makes a smart city truly smart.
In pursuit of this new approach, two Nevada cities have become smart city innovators, and both decided to contract with Cox. Cox Communications is the country’s third largest cable entertainment and broadband services provider, with approximately 6.5 million total residential and commercial customers. Labelling Cox as a “telecom company” is a bit misleading. Delivering value is possible because Cox’s vast fibre network and advanced networking capabilities are organised in a way that delivers a seamless experience for the customer, in this case the city-dweller.
With nearly $20 billion in annual revenues, Cox Enterprises brings more to the table than connectivity. Cox Media, for instance, sells ads in the same geographies where Cox Communications provides services. And this fact makes the Nevada pilots important not only to those two cities, but to all the other cities where Cox will offer smart city solutions in the coming years.
To ignite smart city innovation, Cox harnesses its existing infrastructure, suite of advanced applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) platform, into which third-parties can plug in their own solutions. The platform serves as a single, integrated point of control for use by city employees, and it provides transparent and interoperable solutions.
Partnership working
Cox’s Smart Communities was launched in 2019 as a collaboration between Cox2M (the IoT group inside Cox Enterprises) and Cox Business. This makes it possible to combine Cox2M’s expert capabilities with the company’s full spectrum of relationships and digital infrastructure. Working in partnership with city governments, their communities platform provides a new way for municipalities to drive down costs. At the same time, it helps reduce friction for both cities and technology vendors alike.
These two Nevada pilots address smart city challenges from different angles, based upon their own priorities. But there’s one common thread connecting these pilots: in each case, the municipality and Cox have agreed to work out critical issues in ways that enable future scaling-up for success. These two pilots are ambitious, and they address some of each city’s most pressing needs.
Alyssa Rodriguez, the City of Henderson’s director of information technology, said her city’s “pilot is now underway as an R&D testbed, to integrate an innovative solution ecosystem.” It ties together multiple technologies and services in three distinct areas: connected water meters, connected outdoor lighting controls, and smarter street parking monitoring; all of it powered by advanced analytics.
Rodriguez added: “Cox brings useful on-the-ground experience, having worked for years alongside the public works departments of various cities.” For instance, these pilots have systems with constant power needs. Learning through these pilots helps the team build a better process; they are leveraging technology in ways that ensure more efficient project outcomes. This includes some challenges, such as determining how lidar and other imaging tools used by autonomous vehicles can be best used to sense movements at the curb.
The Las Vegas pilot started in March 2021. The approach is a somewhat different than Henderson’s. Brandy Stanley, the city’s parking services manager, says “this pilot is so important because its’ primary goal is mitigating costly kerbside enforcement.” While there are dozens of traffic management solutions that help cities reduce congestion, and a slew of new ones focused on the curb, some work better than others.
The Las Vegas pilot’s unique ecosystem includes various kinds of technologies, including vehicle sensing and license plate recognition, hyperlocal ad inventory and ad content management from Cox Media, and video departures of different vehicles. Cox and the city are tightly aligned on ensuring that data collected through the pilot is managed, stored and utilised according to the city’s requirements on retention and anonymisation.
Individual parking spaces are monitored, and sensors are positioned in such a way that they detect foot traffic volumes. Each screen displays a countdown clock per space. The city receives a notification of violation when the time runs out and the vehicle has not moved on. Colour coding at each kiosk provides helpful visual cues. For instance, red displayed on the kiosk means that a violation is happening – and that an alert has been sent into the city’s parking enforcement system. Violations include congestion-inducing behaviours, such as double parking and the use of the taxi-only zone by non-taxis.
Funding comes from the revenue generated by the sale of ad spaces which are visible on the reverse side of the kiosk, pointing away from the oncoming traffic. All kinds of data are utilised, including anonymised cell phone data. In other words, more than bulk traffic numbers are being counted. The result is straightforward and desirable: the pilot makes it possible to move 1,000-plus people per day through these six highly valuable parking spaces
In both pilots, solution components and systems are enabled by Cox’s Smart Communities Platform which can leverage Cox’s existing network infrastructure. This includes extensive fibre networks, existing service locations, CBRS networks, LoRA, and point-to-point networks.
Cox’s platform is designed to create frictionless interactions among people and things, and in doing so, it reduces the complexity of commercial IoT. The outcomes are much more than efficiency gains; the platform generates experience improvements.
Achievable outcomes
Barak Weinisman, vice president and general manager of Cox2M and Smart Communities, drives the corporate side of the city partnerships. He explained that Cox’s strategy is not to go it alone, but instead partner with city governments and focus on delivering achievable outcomes and doing so within the framework of modest initiatives. Weinisman says Cox is especially pleased that Henderson and Las Vegas are achieving “initial successes during the pilots’ short half-life”.
As a systems integrator, Cox aims to be a one-stop-shop experience for all the players in the system, and especially for the end-users. The company understands the tech stack, from the top (in the cloud) to the bottom (where users access a wide range of voice, video, data, and other services). What this means, in practice, is that Cox participates at multiple levels inside those projects which it deems of interest, playing any role in the equation which the partner might choose.
Weinisman says cities are great partners “because they truly have to operate in the real world”. The residents served by all this innovation want to see improved services, plus they want their city to act a responsible data steward and keep vigilant in the face of looming cybersecurity threats.
The citizen-centric approach adopted by these two pilots requires Cox to go beyond just acquiring and crunching data. Weinisman’ s view is that “it’s not enough to just visualise the data on dashboards; the results have to be actionable”. For instance, smart curbside management draws on real-time data insights; this allows the city to efficiently adapt to a dynamic curb environment that’s in constant use for commercial deliveries, pick-ups, drop-offs, food delivery and more. This must also be implemented in a way that’s compliant with data privacy demands.
Cox and the cities share a common belief in using a citizen-centric approach to solving problems. Working together they’ve deployed technologies that aim to drive economic development while simultaneously increasing quality of life. “These thoughtful public-private partnerships, fuelled by innovative financing mechanisms, hold out the promise of new city opportunities,” said Weinisman.
Cox is now busy growing partnerships with other communities to utilise network, platform, and IoT solutions – all with a focus on helping transform the urban environment. Building connected and inclusive 21st century urban communities is no small undertaking, whether in Las Vegas or in Henderson. Nor will it be easy for the next round of city partners, beyond Nevada.
On the road to future-proofing cities, enabling smart streets is a step in the right direction. But even with new federal monies from Washington, DC, it still won’t be easy for cities to build connected and inclusive 21st century communities. Having a well-positioned technology company as a partner certainly makes it a more manageable undertaking.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Gordon Feller
Quelle/Source: Smart Cities World, 23.07.2021
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