The Route to Smarter Cities: conference review

The Route to Smarter Cities conference was held in Derby at the Enterprise Centre on 20th February 2014. It was organised by Surveyor / TEC and part - sponsored by Steer Davies Gleave. Although the emphasis was on transport technology, a balance was evident with speakers from local authorities, and transport consultants as well as the likes of IBM.

The conference seemed to work at two levels: the inspirational showing what the future might hold and what even now is being achieved; and the pragmatic highlighting the limitations of poor data, funding challenges, and the prospect of hitting communication network capacity constraints.

Two of the most inspirational papers concerned local authorities that are overcoming the challenges to deliver real benefits.

Hannah Budnitz gave a run-down of what has been achieved by Reading Borough Council, with a key feature being the council’s success at maintaining momentum through political and funding changes. This means that they are now seeing the benefits of a vision and programme initiated within the LTP1  process. This has resulted in growing demand for their bus services, and good progress on walking. They are now looking to transfer some of the lessons learnt to developing their cycle routes and increasing cycling.

Darren Perry then showed us what Northamptonshire County Council is achieving through creative thinking, flexibility, and a preparedness to work in partnership with the private sector (in their case, with Shneider Electric and British Gas). This is resulting in the development of an EV charging network at no cost to the council. One of their innovative ideas is using Fire Stations as community hubs where, amongst other things, you’ll be able to hire an electric powered car club car.

Our own presentations explored what ordinary people want from a ‘smart’ city, and what can be achieved with journey planning tools now, and in the future.

Regarding the former, the clear message from a recent survey Steer Davies Gleave undertook with Research Now is that people want their cities to be pleasant places to live, work and visit. In terms of transport this means somewhere which is designed for people move around easily - whether by walking, cycling or on clean and efficient public transport for longer journeys. The urban design challenge this poses is in creating an appropriate balance between the various functions a city has to fulfil, and the different transport modes that are needed to fulfil them. The presentation suggested achieving by designating different functions to each street, as they are looking to do in London with the new Street Family. Full results of the survey.

With regards to journey planning we focussed on how local authorities are looking to use online multimodal tools to help people make informed decisions, and to provide support in the event of disruption on the transport network. This is possible because these tools are now designed to work on any platform, whether a PC, tablet or mobile phone. Robert Murray,the presenter, showed how possible a great leap forward is in this area now while highlighting an even more exciting future: you can see what this might look like.