Smart City Plan Should Focus On People, Not Just Technology

There is, in India, a palpable feeling of excitement about the future, and with good reason. The country has made massive strides in recent times to emerge as one of the fastest-growing large economies in the world. This has been made possible largely thanks to the government’s push for greater technological inclusivity and better-equipped, more pervasive tech infrastructure. Nowhere is this focus on leveraging technology as a major catalyst for India’s transformation into an empowered, enabled nation more apparent than the ambitious Smart Cities Mission. But even as more than 100 cities prepare themselves for their metamorphosis into inter-connected, efficient, and citizen-friendly urban centres, there remains one key challenge which all stakeholders need to pay close attention to – urban mobility.

Urban mobility is an issue which currently affects almost every large city and metropolis in the world. A joint study conducted by Arthur D. Little and International Association of Public Transport (UITP) in 2014 underlined the mobility challenge that the world currently faces. The report evaluated cities in seven geographical regions on various parameters such as financial attractiveness of public transport, roads density, mean travel time, traffic-related fatalities, and transport-related emissions to generate the Urban Mobility Index (UMI). Eleven cities out of a sample size of 84 managed to score above the global average; only two Indian cities, Kolkata and Mumbai, aggregated better UMI scores than the global average score.

The impact of poor urban mobility on the country’s economy is quite massive. The New Climate Economy Report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate estimates that the cost of environmental degradation reduces India’s GDP by 5.7 per cent annually. This amounts to nearly $80 billion lost every year due to inadequate urban mobility infrastructure. With the country’s urban population expected to go up to 600 million by the end of 2030, the situation could become even more alarming. The data makes obvious the need to put urban mobility at the heart of the Smart Cities Mission, the urgent requirement for investments that can help in the creation of a much better urban mobility infrastructure which focuses on sustainability and efficiency.

This is where networked visualisation technologies step into the picture. By allowing visual communication over an Internet Protocol (IP) based network, these technologies can facilitate better integrations between various regional mobility systems, which in turn boost overall performance. The availability of credible information at the right time also assists traffic control rooms in formulating a coherent vision and strategy, and helps the overall transport infrastructure to serve supra-regional objectives instead of limited regional goals. Other aspects, such as video analytics for traffic and auto accident detection, intelligent transport systems, vehicle management, and dynamic traffic management are also enhanced. The visual data collected can then be distributed and shared with various security centres, operation centres, meeting/crisis rooms, local mobile/remote workforce, and even the citizens to reduce response times and improve the quality of decisions across various interconnected departments and agencies in smart cities across India.

A network-centric visualisation technology can also unlock various other direct and indirect benefits for urban mobility operations in smart cities. Traffic control rooms get detailed real-time data, which enable them to avoid bottlenecks across major points within the city and to respond proactively to emerging conditions. Policymakers, on the other hand, can leverage the traffic condition information to formulate policies that can improve transit use, road safety, and energy consumption, as well as carbon emissions. Real-time data visualisation can also enhance strategic planning by modelling training models that predict travel patterns, allowing urban mobility experiments to be conducted at a fraction of the costs incurred by traditional methods. Furthermore, visualisation of traffic trends and vehicle patterns could facilitate autonomous driving by allowing vehicles to travel closer together and at higher speeds. This will increase the carrying capacity of roads and give the overall mobility landscape a big boost.

India stands at an exciting crossroads in history, and is eagerly looking at technology to lead the way of its progress into a smarter, better future. Through ready access and sharing of visual information, networked visualisation solutions will play a major part in bringing together various stakeholders in the urban mobility landscape and in driving the vision of an interconnected, efficient nation.