How Smart Cities Can Improve Our Lives And Our Communities

I believe that by transforming our cities into smart cities we can harness many of the same digital technologies - invented right here in Silicon Valley - to help people lead safer and healthier lives.

Wikipedia defines a ‘smart city’ as one that uses “information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance quality and performance of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption, and to engage more effectively and actively with its citizens.”

Big Data for Big Cities

Such technologies are already capturing and interpreting massive volumes of data (also known as “Big Data”) to intelligently route people safely through traffic (Waze and Google Maps), identify areas of suspicious activity (NextDoor and Crimereports.com) and help people keep an eye on their homes from anywhere (Nest and SmartThings).  We’re seeing forward-thinking cities like Barcelona and Chicago apply similar technologies from firms like Cisco, GE and IBM to proactively help their citizens to find a parking spot, discover a new local restaurant, monitor air pollution, stay abreast of urgent weather conditions and even help recover lost children.  Providing access to vast amounts of public data through smart networks can increase the speed and richness of communications to help citizens of smart cities be safer, stay healthier, and maybe even feel happier.

Consider the ride sharing service, Uber, which was started just 5 years ago in San Francisco and is now valued at more than $40B.  This new type of business successfully combined crowd-sourced location data from riders’ smartphones with idle private cars to create new benefits - and wealth - for citizens and entrepreneurs.  The stress of trying to find an available taxi in a crowded city on a dark night has forever been replaced with a sense of gratification as the Uber car you ordered minutes ago on your smartphone glides to a stop in front of you and the driver greets you by name.  No more fumbling for credit cards or guessing if you have enough cash in your pocketbook since Uber's prices are shown before you hail your car.  Uber passengers feel safer, are more in control and often pay less than they would without access to this type of Big Data and smart city networks.  

Uber Community Edition

Let’s take this ride-sharing concept a bit further and apply it to a civic level. What if we could provide this same technology to a local organization to encourage their members to share an open seat in their cars on their way to work, to the grocery store, or to their place of worship - free of charge.  Not only would this cut down on traffic, pollution, and accidents but it could also provide freedom to a whole group of people who have yet to benefit from the technological advances we often take for granted.  Many of the poorest or oldest citizens find it hard to benefit from public or private transportation due to cost or other access concerns.  Imagine the quality of life improvements felt by such underprivileged people (not to mention the uplift to a driver’s own sense of well-being for brightening someone’s day) that a Good Samaritan Ride Sharing network could provide a major city such as San Jose, Boston or San Francisco.

IoP: The Internet of Parking

Ride sharing services benefit a city by reducing the number cars on its streets while partially alleviating another urban pain point: parking.  It has been estimated that thirty percent of all city traffic is caused by drivers simply looking for a parking spot.  Barcelona, Los Angeles, San Mateo and other cities have already implemented what seem like futuristic solutions to this problem by combining pavement smart sensors, video cameras and smartphone apps.  Now an empty parking spot notifies a driver and the spot gets reserved and paid for instantly.  Not only does this take the stress out of finding a parking spot, reduce city traffic and carbon emissions, but it also connects to enforcement systems, alerts traffic officers, and notifies users when it’s time to return to their car to prevent a ticket. The system also provides valuable data to help cities better plan for future parking needs and opens the door to increased revenues, more foot traffic, and even on-demand pricing for major civic events.

Safety as a Service

The same cameras that keep an eye on a parking spot can be combined with others on private homes, like those part of San Jose’s Camera Registry Program.  Simply publicizing the existence of such a system can reduce the likelihood of a crime occurring in a watch zone. If a crime does occur, these systems help law enforcement to quickly access camera footage and speed their investigation.  In the future, one might imagine live feeds from surveillance cameras in public areas watched over by individuals who use social media to alert their neighbors to possible threats.  Introduced earlier this month, San Jose is searching for creative ways to entice innovative firms to convert our 40,000 streetlights to brighter, less expensive LEDs without using public funds.  Here is an opportunity to expand the range of cameras and technology literally watching over its communities by leveraging a city's land, buildings and other assets to improve the safety and well-being of its citizens.  

Helping Smart Cities Help the Aging

A lot has been written about the upcoming ‘Silver Tsunami’ predicting that by 2020 nearly 20% of the US population will be senior citizens.  The fact is, even though we’re living longer lives our cities haven’t changed to accommodate a significantly larger elderly or infirmed population. The best we currently offer is access to a public phone network so that people can dial 911 in an emergency.  Such services are often inadvertently abused by people who have no other alternative when faced with an urgent health issue.  Yet the same technology that lets people watch over their pets via the Internet can be adapted to constantly keep our loved ones connected to proactive remote monitoring services.  Imagine computers embedded in our clothing, or smartwatches, or in smartpills that keep a digital eye on us, automatically sending health information to our doctors or guardians.  A patient can easily be monitored from anywhere instead of requiring access to an expensive hospital or nursing home.  This network could also send medicine reminders to smart pill bottles or immediately sense important changes in a patients’ vital signs, intelligently dispatching the appropriate measures to improve their prognosis.  

Smart cities may very well become ideal retirement destinations because their citizens can leverage these innovations to stay constantly connected to an ‘active health caring community’ and gain the peace of mind to enjoy the best years of their lives.