Insights and Ideas for Smart Cities - CenturyLink · OCTOBER 2017 SPECIAL REPORT Insights and Ideas for Smart Cities Dispatches from our coverage of the tools, strategies and systems

OCTOBER 2017 SPECIAL REPORT

Insights and Ideas for Smart CitiesDispatches from our coverage of the tools, strategies and systems fueling tech- and data-driven innovation in city governments.

Page 2At the Center of Everything | Route Fifty

A Year Following Its Smart City Challenge Win, What’s Next for Ohio’s Capital?by michael grass

In June 2016, then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced that Columbus, Ohio had won the Smart City Challenge, a competitive effort among U.S. cities to secure $50 million in federal and private-sector funding that brought together a variety of cross-sector partners interested in shaping and deploying carbon-friendly technologies and strategies to manage the vital infrastructure and systems that cities rely on.

At the time, the selection of Columbus was something a surprise, considering that some better-known tech hubs were among the seven finalist cities, including Austin and San Francisco. The team from Columbus and its neighbors in Central Ohio brought together an impressive coalition of local partners, including American Electric Power Inc., Battelle, Car2Go, the Central Ohio Transit Authority, Clean Fuels Ohio, CoGo, Columbus

2020, Columbus Chamber of Commerce, Columbus Partnership, Experience Columbus, Franklin County, General Motors, Honda, IBM, Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, the Ohio Department of Transportation, the Ohio State University, Siemans and Uber, among others. Beyond the local partners, the Smart City Challenge national partners included AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Autodesk, DC Solar, Mobileeye and Sidewalk Labs.

The state’s largest city has offered a bit of a blank slate in which to think about how its peer jurisdictions can best embrace emerging and evolving transportation and energy technologies.


In all, the Columbus bid has been able to bring in $500 million in public- and private-sector funding commitments. That’s an impressive show of force to create a local testbed for smart technology.

As part of the competition, Seattle-based Vulcan, as a driving private-sector force behind the Smart City Challenge, committed $10 million to the winning city to get work started as the rest of the vision and long-term strategy came together.

In the near term, Columbus has been working with one of its local partners, American Electric Power Co., to bring upgrades to infrastructure and deploying electric vehicle recharging stations to targeted areas, including 25 high-speed charging stations. The long-term goal is decarbonizing the local electricity grid and pivoting away from city-owned vehicle fleets, buses and taxis that use internal combustion engines and shift toward electric ones.

Ohio’s capital, in some ways, has offered a bit of a blank slate in which to think about how U.S. cities can best embrace emerging and evolving transportation and energy technology. Many of the Smart Columbus projects have been envisioned as ways to use

technology to bridge socio-economic divisions, including ways to benefit Linden, a Columbus neighborhood with high concentrations of poverty, infant mortality and households without access to personal transportation.

Among the other Smart Columbus projects: proposals to build infrastructure to support connected-vehicle technology on key corridors, including crash-avoidance systems on buses and deploying autonomous shuttles to connect a suburban transit center with a major shopping area and employment hub; develop multi-modal transit planning apps and a transit benefit program to give downtown-bound single-occupancy-vehicle commuters alternative options to reach their destination; and leverage logistics-focused technologies at the Rickenbacker Inland Port, a major cargo-only airport and freight hub.

If a city like Columbus, where its suburban areas are very similar to so many other sprawling metro areas, can retrofit its electricity grid and deploy advanced transportation and energy technologies, the lessons learned and strategies used could reshape the rest of America’s cities.

While Columbus may have been the ultimate winner of the Smart City Challenge, its

impacts, in time, will also be felt across a much larger footprint beyond Ohio’s capital city. That includes the other Smart City Challenge finalists—Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland and San Francisco—also, through the development of a “playbook” using lessons learned, performance metrics and sustainable financing tools that other cities can use.

Now, more than a year after the selection of Columbus as the winner of the Smart City Challenge, Route Fifty is exploring what comes next for other cities embracing smart technologies, applications and strategies. Check out our special report, which includes a conversation with the chief innovation officer in Kansas City, Missouri, one of the other seven Smart City Challenge finalists; Pittsburgh, another finalist city; and Louisville, a city known for fostering an innovative, data-driven local government.

Michael GrassExecutive Editor, Route FiftyGovernment Executive Media Group


The network is the foundation for all smart city initiatives. Regardless of where you are in your journey to becoming a smart community, Ciena and CenturyLink can help build a cohesive, secure, future-proof network.

To learn more, visit: www.ciena.com/SLED or www.centurylink.com/ges.

Start with citizens in mind — you might be trying to improve quality of life, boost economic development or increase operational efficiencies. Whatever the case, having a specific goal will help you determine the technologies and solutions you need.

TOP 4 REASONS CITIES ARE IMPLEMENTING SMART TECHNOLOGIES: Increase citizen satisfaction

Improve government responsiveness

Increase collaboration with city departments

Reduce operation costs1

While bandwidth may not be an issue now, it might be tomorrow. A scalable network will allow you to start small and grow as your needs evolve.

Determine what devices are generating data, where that data will be stored, who truly needs access to the data, whether and how you will analyze that data, and how the network can better support real-time data transmission.

Governments transmit and store sensitive data, including personally identifiable information. It’s essential to implement a secure, robust network that can help you protect information as it’s captured and transmitted across connected devices and platforms.

Look beyond start-up expenses and determine maintenance, repair and management costs before embarking on a smart city initiative.

2 3 4 5IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM YOU WANT TO SOLVE.

BUILD FOR SCALABILITY AND PLAN AHEAD.

IDENTIFY DATA SOURCES.

BUILD IN SECURITY FROM THE BEGINNING.

KEEP LONGEVITY IN MIND.

TODAY, LESS THAN 1% OF ALL DATA IS ANALYZED OR USED.4

The Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-based applications and other cutting-edge technologies comprise a smart community. To build a smarter community, state and local governments need an intelligent network infrastructure with a well-thought-out management layer that provides fast, secure, reliable connectivity to applications and resources.

When evaluating your network, follow these steps to help ensure a future-proof solution.

Steps to an Intelligent Network for Smart Communities

1

BY 2019, ANNUAL GLOBAL IP TRAFFIC WILL REACH

2 ZETTABYTES.3

THERE ARE

INTERNET-CONNECTED “THINGS” RIGHT NOW — 20.4 BILLION ARE PROJECTED TO BE ONLINE BY 2020.2

8.4 BILLION IN 2017, UNSECURED IOT DEVICES MAY RESULT IN

WITH AN AVERAGE OF 1 ATTACK PER MONTH REACHING 1 TBPS IN SIZE.

5

ENSURING ACCESS TOFINANCIAL RESOURCES OVER TIME IS CITIES’

No. 1Challenge.6

Endnotes1. www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917 2. Ibid. 3. www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/iot-and-really-big-data/ 4. Ibid. 5. www.computerweekly.com/news/450411183/2017-may-be-crisis-year-for-DDoS-attacks-warns-Deloitte 6. 2016 Smart Cities Survey, The United States Conference of Mayors and HIS Market

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a curtain of dense, yellow smog killed 20 residents and shortened the lives of countless others in the industrial town of Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948, when a temperature inversion trapped pollution in the breathable air in and around the borough southeast of Pittsburgh. Had the inversion lasted an extra day, an estimated 1,000 people would have perished. Fast forward to the present century, when air pollution and heat waves increasingly pose challenges to cities domestically and abroad—including 15,000 excess deaths in France in August 2003.

Pittsburgh, as part of its ONEPGH resilience strategy, has begun testing emergency response technology coupled

Simulating Scenarios for Killer Smog Conditions

In Pennsylvania’s second-largest city, predictive analytics are getting better at profiling the clinical impact of air- and heat-related emergencies, as well as the stress they place on response infrastructure.

by dave nyczepir


with predictive analytics to assess how current response infrastructure might hold up in such a crisis.

“How bad does ‘bad’ have to be to break the system?” asked Chris Callsen, Intermedix vice president of operations analytics, in an interview with Route Fifty. The Nashville, Tennessee-based tech company’s Optima Predict response planning simulation was paired with the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health’s Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics (FRED) modeling system to build a profile of increased demand for emergency management services. First FRED estimates smog and heat’s clinical impact on different communities, such as the number of acute respiratory disease-related 9-1-1 calls, and then Optima generates an EMS response plan for personnel, vehicles and other resources.

“Using technology and professional experience together is a great way for us to model how systems interact, and we can also use different scenarios and circumstances to replicate the process in the future,” Rebecca Kiernan, the city of Pittsburgh’s senior resilience coordinator, said in a statement.

Increase demand on the system in the FRED model, and the city can see how EMS would respond to the heavier workload and develop mitigation strategies. This all took place during a day-long event in April facilitated by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program for 50-plus public health, emergency management and air quality professionals from across Western Pennsylvania. As resources were spun up to 300 percent normal volume in the simulator, the system became less stable. At 400 percent, EMS response times were much longer—some almost an hour. And by 500 percent, the breaking point, the system in theory collapses, Callsen said. Pittsburgh’s EMS system is designed so incidents are handled within 45 minutes to an hour, but at the response system’s collapse, resources are stuck waiting for hospital beds to open. Most incidents take up to an hour to respond to, let alone be treated and cleared. The workshop posed a hypothetical, rather than addressing what Pittsburgh should do in the situation. And the possibility of calling for outside aid, thereby adding resources like 20 units of Federal Emergency Management Agency task force to the system, wasn’t factored into the simulation.

Still, crisis response professionals liked the concept of being able to create scenarios with realistic simulation outputs, Callsen said. Like many cities, Pittsburgh faces problems related to aging infrastructure an existing modeling tool other than FRED could help simulate, like a utility being unable to deliver potable water continuously leading to system failure. Serious air pollution creates a number of medically complex patients, who require health care infrastructure. Moving forward, Pittsburgh could test how to accommodate them with increased accuracy. The simulation findings are in the process of being put into a report, Callsen said, with the potential to be presented at 100 RC’s annual conference as a best practice for other communities.

“The door is open to work with Pittsburgh going forward, where once we get additional documentation then next steps can be identified,” Callsen said. “Everybody left the room thinking there was more value to be had.”


kansas city, missouri is preparing to expand its network of digital kiosks, public wireless internet and sensor technology. The growth is set to take place along a planned bus rapid transit corridor that will be centered on Prospect Avenue, in an eastern part of the city that is lagging economically. It will build upon technology already in place around the 2.2-mile KC Streetcar line that runs through downtown, mostly along Main Street. Bob Bennett, who has served as the city’s chief innovation officer for nearly two years, sat down with Route Fifty to discuss the expansion. With the Prospect Avenue bus corridor project, he explained, the city will aim to tailor so-called smart city technology to the priorities of area residents—like

Building Upon Smart Infrastructure Investments

An interview with Chief Innovation Officer Bob Bennett.

connecting people with jobs and combatting crime. Construction on the bus rapid transit line is scheduled to begin early next year and service is slated to start in 2020. As planned, the bus line would cost about $54 million to build and would extend about 9 miles, between 75th Street in the south and downtown Kansas City in the north.

The tech expansion will include about 6,000 new LED streetlights, which will have sockets for sensors and wireless internet equipment. Bennett said funding has been secured for the lighting fixtures and that he anticipates installation of them to begin in the next couple of months. There are also plans to install additional

by bill lucia


ShotSpotter devices, which incorporate audio sensors to help locate where gunfire has occurred. Bennett said the build-out along the new bus line of technology like wireless internet and sensor systems would likely begin around February 2018. “Every six months, what you’re going to see, is about another mile-and-a-half to two-mile expansion of the network,” he said. The kiosks are expected to be similar to around two dozen already installed in downtown, around the streetcar line. Bennett described the devices as “seven-foot-tall iPhones” standing in the street and said they’re getting used, on average, about 25,000 times each month. Expanded public Wi-Fi, according to Bennett, could give K-12 students who currently lack home internet access another option for completing homework that requires them to go online. He also explained that the content featured on the kiosk screens at the bus shelters would be

“hyperlocal” and might feature information developed by the city’s Full Employment Council, like how to access nearby job training opportunities, or where to get help preparing a resume.

Displaying data on the kiosks about incidents recorded by ShotSpotter was another possibility he mentioned. There’s been some debate about the effectiveness of ShotSpotter. But Bennett said in Kansas City the system helped lead to 184 arrests in the city last year. Data remains at the core of the city’s smart city efforts.

“The technologies are interesting, and the technologies are cool, but they’re not smart. The only thing smart about a smart city is the data,” Bennett said. “We have figured out that probably 80 percent of the data that we need to truly be a smart city, we already had.” This included data culled from crime statistics, road studies, and information related to tax collections and water use. Combining existing city data with new sensor technology has unlocked new opportunities for the city to improve services and cut costs, according to Bennett. For instance, he said a combination of analytics and traffic sensors have enabled the city to predict, down to the block, where potholes will likely form and to then preemptively take action to resurface streets before they start to get cratered.

“That’s literally millions of dollars that we’re

saving because we’re using the data better,” Bennett said. He acknowledged snags with the city’s smart cities initiatives, pointing to multiple versions of the kiosks that the city has so far tried. And to a pilot project with Bridj, an app-based, shuttle van service, which attracted slim ridership. Bridj, a Boston-based startup, shutdown earlier this year. Key to keeping the appetite alive in the city for smart city initiatives, Bennett said, has been experimenting with low-cost pilot projects and sharing risk with the private sector when possible.

“It’s been very iterative. We have failed a lot so far,” he added. “But we’ve learned a lot.”


louisville, kentucky was the fifth city to join navigation app Waze’s Connected Citizens data-sharing program, when it launched two years ago, but unlike others, it’s actually using the information. Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013 for $1.15 billion, seeks street, road closure and construction data from Louisville in return for anonymized trip information alerting the city to traffic jams, delays, accidents, potholes and downed limbs. The trade was a no-brainer.

“It was easy for us to give that information because we were already collecting it,” Michael Schnuerle, Office of Civic Innovation data officer, told Route Fifty in an interview.

Few of the cities that are part of the navigation app’s Connected Citizens data-sharing program actually do anything with the anonymized trip information they receive because of the volume.

Moving to the Cloud, This City Made Its Waze Data Actionable by dave nyczepir


“And we just put that on our open data portal, and they can collect it from there.” Historic traffic information is helpful, and new use cases are still being found. But Louisville still wanted to centralize its traffic-related data with Waze’s and run predictive analytics on it in real time to help with signal timing among other applications. So the city applied for and won an Amazon Web Services (AWS) City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge Dream Big grant to build an adaptive, traffic-flow management system. Waze data now comes in every two minutes as a JSON file in Amazon S3, where previously files were processed in an internal Microsoft server using a bunch of code to ingest the information. Data could be accessed and queried, but not to its full potential. At 600 million rows of data, joint table queries simply weren’t well supported like they are in the cloud for faster results. Data can now be merged to interact with signals, Louisville’s bus system and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet local info. Only a handful of the cities that are part of Waze’s CCP use the data because it’s hard to manage, Schnuerle said, but moving to the cloud also enables Louisville to share its data structures on GitHub so others can replicate how it’s now using the information.

“Waze data is coming in in real time, but not everything is happening in real time right now,” Schnuerle said. “That’s kind of our goal.” KentuckyWired, the state’s broadband infrastructure initiative, selected corridors throughout Louisville where gigabit fiber would be laid as part of a larger effort to establish a mesh network countywide. The city is laying a municipal fiber network on top of Kentucky’s, remotely connecting more traffic signals with the help of the Amazon grant. By chasing the state, Louisville doesn’t have to worry about ground rock or right-of-way issues.

“Wherever they’re digging, we’re digging,” Schnuerle said. Connected corridors align with the five major

“spokes” of the city’s transportation system converging on downtown, where traffic congestion is worst. There are currently a few radar sensors at intersections monitoring vehicle speeds, and more will be added to collect vehicle count, size differentiation and turning data.

Waze data is coming in in real time, but not everything is happening in real time right now. That's kind of our goal.

Michael Schnuerle, Office of Civic Innovation Data Officer

Schnuerle wants emergency responders to get to the scene of accidents quicker and to relieve congestion by manipulating signal timing, once real-time analytics are established. When changes are made along traffic corridors, they’ll be analyzed to see how effective they are rather than having a study conducted.

“The flow of citizens around the county will be improved,” Schnuerle said.


About the Authors

Michael Grass Executive Editor

Michael Grass, who joined the Government Executive Media Group in June 2014, is Executive Editor of Route Fifty. He is also the founding co-editor of DCist.com and worked as a copy editor at Roll Call, local and online editor at The Washington Post's Express newspaper, deputy managing editor at The New York Observer's Politicker.com, deputy managing editor at Washington City Paper and the D.C., Maryland and Virginia local editor for The Huffington Post. He also managed a non-profit network of state-based policy news sites in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.

Dave Nyczepir

News Editor

Dave Nyczepir is a News Editor for Route Fifty. He previously was a reporter at the Desert Sun newspaper in Southern California's Coachella Valley and worked for Campaigns & Elections magazine and covered Maryland's 2012 legislative session for the University of Maryland's Capital News Service and holds a master's of journalism from the University of Maryland.

Bill Lucia

Senior Reporter

Bill Lucia is a Senior Reporter for Route Fifty. He previously covered Seattle city government for Crosscut.com and holds a master's in public administration from the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs.

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Insights and Ideas for Smart Cities - CenturyLink · OCTOBER 2017 SPECIAL REPORT Insights and Ideas for Smart Cities Dispatches from our coverage of the tools, strategies and systems