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Mitzie Hunter, CEO, Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance
By Mitzie Hunter
Like many city-dwellers worldwide, residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) have reached an impasse. Our congestion problems are getting worse and worse, and we now have some of the longest commuting times in North America. Congestion is not only taking a toll on our economy and our environment, but also on our health and our quality of life.
IBM’s Social Sentiment Index research pulled tens of thousands of tweets about traffic from five major cities across Canada. The exercise homed in on what our residents feel is most important—not surprisingly, Toronto’s commuters were the most active to vent their opinions. Toronto had 10,000 tweets about traffic over an 11-month period, 40 percent of which were explicitly negative. By contrast, only 20 percent of tweets in Halifax were negative. Continue Reading »
Graham Mackintosh, Business Executive, Social Analytics, IBM Software Group
By Graham Mackintosh
Social sentiment analysis is the new darling in the world of digital marketing and Big Data analytics. But while making sense of opinions posted publicly on Twitter sounds easy, it’s not. It’s a lot more complex if you’re looking at the meaning and tone of natural language conveyed by Twitter’s fire hose of 200 million active users.
Telemetry is the science of measuring data at a distance over communications networks. When put in this context, social media can be thought of as “human telemetry” – a virtual town square where we can understand our social interactions and preferences by analyzing everything that is said and shared via blogs and tweets.
Human telemetry applies to more than trending topics on Twitter. Consider healthcare. Within an urban center, regional hospitals already exchange real-time information – such as admission rates and bed-space data — to help with ambulance routing and finding the right type of doctor. Continue Reading »
Sylvie Spalmacin-Roma, Vice President, Smarter Cities, IBM Europe
By Sylvie Spalmacin-Roma
If you run over a pothole or perhaps a train is delayed on your morning commute, what do you do? It’s unlikely that you would pick up the phone to call the city to report it or attend a meeting on the topic being held by your local government. The more likely scenario is that you would take to social media to mention the location of the pothole or express your frustration with the delay.
Today’s citizens can be seen as engaged but in a very different manner. Twitter, Facebook and other social channels serve as a 24/7 town hall meeting for an increasing number of us digitally connected citizens. Social listening and analysis can be a valuable tool for cities.
People are passionate about their commute. Love it or hate it, we have much to say about it. The most recent IBM Social Sentiment Index looks at sentiment in traffic around several European cities in France, Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Continue Reading »
Ed Cole, Executive Director, Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee
By Ed Cole
Earlier this year, the New York Times ran an article in which it called Nashville, Tennessee – the “it” city.
The coverage was an exciting and complimentary tribute to Nashville as a culturally-rich, fast growing metropolitan region. The Times highlighted the culture with music and trendy restaurants, and the economic health of the region attributing that in part to our, “mix of employers in fields like health care management, religious publishing, car manufacturing and higher education, led by Vanderbilt University.”
For all the accolades in the Times piece, there was mention of a very real problem in our “it” city – the need for better transportation.
How are we going to get to enjoy all the city has to offer, the live music venues, the parks, the museums, or the chic social gatherings, if our roadways are choking with congestion? Continue Reading »
Naveen Lamba, Global Smarter Transportation leader, IBM Global Business Services
By Naveen Lamba
Circling for a parking spot, worrying about feeding the parking meters, and ultimately wondering if you should just turn around and go home. These are familiar feelings for anyone who has ever had to find a parking spot in a hurry. Not only is it frustrating, but the time spent looking for parkin
g also contributes to traffic congestion – some research suggests 30 percent on average – and air pollution.
Parking is an area of transportation that had seen little innovation until a just a few years ago. With today’s technology – from sensors to smarter meters to advanced analytics – cities can reinvent parking to help reduce congestion and make our cities more livable.
Enter Streetline, a Silicon Valley start-up that provides Smart Parking solutions to cities, garages, airports, universities and other private parking providers. The company is the creator of Parker™, a free smartphone app that guides drivers to available parking spaces in real time.
The company won the 2010 IBM SmartCamp, a global entrepreneurship program that identifies early stage start-ups in the Smarter Planet industries. Through this program, Streetline had access to a global network of experts and advisors. Since then, Streetline and IBM have continued working together.
(Next week IBM will host the 2013 Global SmartCamp Finals in New York City.) Continue Reading »
Charles Vincent, Chief Architect, IBM Global Center of Competency for Energy and Utilities
By Fabienne Guildhary, IBM Communications, Energy & Utilities/Media & Entertainment
Often, history serves as a tool to teach us valuable lessons and help us avoid repeating the same mistakes. As Chief Architect of the IBM Global Center of Competency for Energy and Utilities, Charles Vincent is leveraging his considerable knowledge of Electric Vehicles (EVs) to better shape the future of transportation.
Charles’ passion for EVs was sparked long before his career in electronic transportation took off. Fascinated by the technology at an early age, Charles devoted a lot of time poring over vintage publications on the subject, such as American Electric Vehicle Association newsletters from the early 1900’s. Then in the 1980’s, Charles got the opportunity to put his knowledge and passion to work.
David Lee, Executive Partner, IBM Global Business Services, Ireland
By David Lee
Internal combustion engines fueled by petroleum continue to power the vast majority of vehicles around the world and continue to produce the largest percentage of CO2 from the transportation sector.
Since transportation is one of the largest sectors in Europe, it’s no wonder the mission of the European Green Cars Initiative is to support research and development on technologies that help advance such things as renewable, non-polluting energy, transportation safety, and traffic flow. In other words, the group’s objective is to help create a smarter, greener, integrated transport system.
As part of this effort is a campaign to increase the number of electric cars on our roads.
Posted by
ShivaKumar in
Rapid urbanization, strained infrastructure, enormous amounts of data are placing new demands — and creating enormous opportunities — for cities and their resources. Public leaders must find new ways to engage with citizens on critical issues and services.
Business and public sector leaders gathered at the smarter cities forum India to discuss how to tackle the challenges and opportunities that cities in India face today, such as how they can better cope with infrastructure demands as the population continues to grow at an exponential rate.
The town hall meeting where citizens voiced their opinions on city affairs is more often happening online in an unorganized fashion rather than in person. If cities can understand the wealth of online content and public commentary –positive or negative — on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook, it will give them new opportunities to engage with its citizens in real time and more quickly pinpoint and prioritize areas that are top of mind.
Now, cities will have a way to better measure and understand public opinions on key city issues and services, such as public transportation or education, using advanced analytics. By understanding the public sentiments of those living and working in a city, public sector leaders can create a new virtual town hall that can foster faster, more informed decisions that will in turn lead to improved services for citizens and more judicious uses of valuable resources.
Let’s take India and its three largest cities as an example. A more nuanced understanding of public sentiment could give a city additional insight into key areas to focus its attentions and resources, perhaps increasing public transit options during specific weather events in one city or implementing Bus Rapid Transit to attract certain industries in another.
by Thomas Erickson, Social Scientist, IBM Research
Parking is a pain. Searching for a spot transforms time and gasoline into stress and CO2. Studies estimate that 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts is produced by drivers cruising for parking while IBM’s 2011 Global Parking Survey noted that drivers spent an average of 20 minutes looking for a parking spot. This is the driving force (sorry) behind a new wave of urban systems that use sensors and analytics to make parking more efficient.
These new systems bring to mind an experience I had while visiting Dubuque, Iowa to attend a meeting. I’d forgotten that I’d parked at a meter, my meeting went an hour longer than expected, and I came back to see a ticket on my windshield. I was annoyed at myself. But then I looked at the ticket: it was a “courtesy ticket” for $0.” How nice, I thought, ‘Dubuque is a great city!’
I don’t know if technology was behind it. Perhaps it was my out-of-state plates or perhaps all first offenders get a courtesy ticket. But not all cities are as forgiving. A week later, in my home city of Minneapolis, I got a $42 ticket for a 3-minute lapse—no reprieve for first offenders here. In neither case was a smart meter involved, but I started thinking about how smart parking meters ought to behave.
This week IBM will receive the World Environment Center’s Gold Medal Award, so we asked students at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise to share their views on sustainability (we’ve included a video to show what IBM is doing to make the world smarter). From John Seaver:
A recent report by the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the Brookings Institute, called Transit Access and Zero Vehicle Households, revealed several striking statistics about Detroit transit. Of the 136,000 households without cars in the Detroit metro area, 85% have access to transit, but only 26% of jobs are accessible to these households within 90 minutes via that same transit.
It seems impossible to think that there is no connection between the challenges the city faces and the poor mobility of its population. This personally interests me because I am attending graduate school in Southeast Michigan. It is also important to me because I care about creating a sustainable future. And sustainability means more than protecting the environment; it also means protecting and enhancing people’s lives. Imagine the potential to create economic value by simply connecting labor with jobs through smarter public transportation.
