Ben Ransley says the term smart city can mean many things. But it comes down to using digital technologies and data to improve day-to-day operations and give citizens a better quality of life.
Ransley is the founder and managing director of Smart City, an Auckland-based business focused on transport, waste and urban furniture.
His company works on a project to monitor traffic flows, collecting data to make more informed decisions that increase network efficiency, reduce congestion and improve air quality.
“Being a smart city comes back to monitoring and sensing everything in real time.
“That means we can see how the city moves and how it reacts to things. Then we can roll with the punches in an informed way.
“This is relatively new to Auckland but has been done overseas in places like Beijing, Singapore, Dubai and Seoul. All these cities are developing smart city ecosystems to basically improve the way everything’s run and improve the quality of life for their citizens through all these different technologies and all these different data sets.
“Doing this requires a strategic overview and a change in thinking. We’ve been slow to do that in Auckland.”
Auckland is more advanced in terms of the digital nervous system needed to operate a smart city.
Ransley says it means using a lot of small sensors and devices which collect and process data locally using small built-in Internet-of-Things (IoT) computers.
“They then send the data to a cloud service. Having a 5G network is ideal for that, it means backhaul is easy. Fibre is even better. If you want to stream high resolution video, maybe from a CCTV system, fibre will do that efficiently.
“5G and fibre are the infrastructure needed to support a smart city”.
Auckland Transport approached Ransley and Smart City looking for an innovative way to promote public transport use on key routes during peak hours.
“We were asked to come up with a solution that would help Auckland Transport send a positive message about the benefits of public transport. They wanted to target people on the roads in traffic at peak hours in order to change their thinking about public transport.
The idea was to showcase how much quicker and easier it can be to travel on public transport during those peak times.
“We used roadside real-time travel time messages to show how much faster it would be to get to the central city using public transport when compared to private passenger vehicles.”
Ransley says the message was effective because people get angry sitting in traffic. They would rather spend time with their families than commuting.
Smart City’s role started by using its expertise to dig into the real time traffic data collected by sensors and by trackers installed on buses.
“By displaying this information simply at the side of the road using our SmartVMS (Smart Variable Message Signs) we successfully changed people’s travel behaviour.”
The project was effective, in part because it carried such a simple message.
Ransley says a driver would see the sign and realise that it would be twice as fast to take a bus to town when compared to commuting by car.
“It was exciting to work on and we picked up some great survey results from the trial initiative.
“One interesting piece of feedback from commuters was about the accuracy of the data.”
There was a 96% positive feedback rating on the signs from the public. More importantly, Ransley says: “We had 63% of public transport users say they made changes to how they travel as a result of the messages.
“It goes to show how some smart thinking coupled with practical solutions can quickly make a positive difference.
“The trial was two months long and we were able to make an impact on that many people in such a short time.”
Ransley sees this kind of smart city project as being able to have a positive influence, changing long established behaviour patterns and improving people’s lives in a messy world.
Yet he sees the human side of the project and the thinking behind it as far more important than the technology itself. “You have to think about what we’re trying to achieve and not focus on the flashy components. It meant working closely with the client to ensure we went about it in the right way.
“That meant going back and looking at it from the citizens point of view, putting ourselves in their place and asking: ‘how would I feel about this?’ and ‘how would it benefit me?‘”
Ransley says in the past he has used the SmartVMS technology to handle road detours, to manage driver expectations with messages showing how long it might take to reach the airport or the city centre.
“We had a project in West Auckland along Lincoln Rd, where crews were doing road rejuvenation works. “Typically, you might have VMSs along the road telling drivers that there are roadworks ahead and they might consider taking these alternative routes. It’s useful, but it doesn’t give the road user much information.
“We wanted to improve the road user experience giving them more meaningful and actionable insight into what’s actually going on up ahead.
“So we used our smart traffic system to define alternative detour routes, then collect the travel times along these routes and display them on the signs in real time. They are updated every 10 minutes.
“So when a road user reaches the signs they can see their options.
“This puts the decision-making back into the road user’s hands.
“This effectively minimises congestion through roadworks and optimises travel time.”
From there Ransley moved on to similar work helping road users navigate the Eastern Busway project. This involved pulling down real time data to help people make more informed decisions about their journeys.
In this case Ransley says it meant 5% of drivers switched to taking public transport, which resulted in a meaningful reduction in overall congestion.
● Smart City is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Project Auckland report.