Digital Technologies to Shape the Future of Urban Transportation Planning

As part of the Responsive City Initiative at MIT, Christopher Zegras presented a state of the use of digital technologies to shape the future of urban transportation planning. Current research threads in the domain focus on sensing and planning activities, movements, morphology, infrastructure and energy, yet there is lack of common platform. Simulation and forecasting are the main analytical methods. Yet the field is mainly driven by the private sector to the point of questioning the role of academic research. The big players include (in the US and UK):

• Inrix: a data provider from stationary sources, toll systems, 650,000 vehicule probes. They then clean and fuse the data and sell them to TomTom, Garmin, dash.
• Navteq – Traffic.com: road sensor network (biggest in the US) – One big issue is that, in some cases, these companies contractually own the data, that become inaccessible to study.
• ITIS Holdings and TrafficMaster (cctv, fixed sensors, probes)
• TomTom Mobility Solutions: celphone vehicule tracking (with Vodafone) project from next year 7mio phones they get their information from
• TeleAtlas
• Traffic from cellphone triangulation: IntelliOne, AirSage, CellInt
• Public transportation real-time transit information and schedules: hopstop, transloc, mybus, nextbus, Google
• Energy: Carbon Hero that calculates carbon footprints

These multiple market-driven actions leave governments way behind the curve. For instance, the many data used for planning the future of Boston were collected in 1991 (!). Similarly, Los Angeles owns one of the widest network of road sensors. Yet these data are only use to master the the real-time dynamics of the infrastructure and then thrown to the garbage. The archives are not used to improve the system (!). In other situations, governments delegate the efforts the private sector and lose control of the data. So what is the role for academic research here? Maybe to shade light on the privacy issues, provide a more holistic view on this ecosystem, understand the implications for governance? Before transport planning was about predict and accommodate and it become more observe and improve. In that perspective, a research avenue deals with user innovation and understand the implications for governance. As WikiCity aims to explore: how do we empower customers of transport systems and give them back real-time, mobile ubiquitous data? Similar to what TomTom MapShare does by letting users modify and share maps.

Relation to my thesis: Understanding the current state of the implication of real-time data for urban transportation planning. Interestingly there is now a focus on volunteer generated data and their implications as well as understanding how sensor data can be disseminated into our practices (problem of their granularity was mentioned, how solution satisfy lifestyles and preferences (such as the new ride sharing services) but also techniques to evaluate the viability of these solutions.