Infrastructure
A broad category of content focused on infrastructure-related topics in cities.
Examples: the built environment, building management systems, smart lighting, airports, street design
10 Goals for Fremont Boulevard’s Safe & Smart Corridor
A mid-sized city’s demonstration corridor for innovation in safety, sustainability, and multimodal mobility.
Why Parking Issues Should Matter to Cities
The most important aspect of achieving a streamlined parking experience is real-time guidance to all parking options and reliable, live information and updates. If a driver travels downtown and is looking to park somewhere central for a day of shopping, he or she must be made aware of which public on-street parking, surface lots, or garages are full before taking the time to search them for an open space.
Copenhagen: Designing for a Changing Climate and a Better City
The focus on the co-benefits of adaptation has proved to be important. Demonstrating that adaptation does not need to be only about preventing disaster, but can also improve the livability of the city by creating new recreational spaces, greening the city, and making it a nicer place also when it is not raining has been a key factor in the popularity of the cloudburst management plan.
A Safe & Cost-Effective Alternative Water Supply for Potable Reuse
Altamonte Springs wanted to demonstrate a treatment system that produces purified water that meets or exceeds all drinking water quality standards. This would create an alternative water supply that is protective of public health and uses an energy-efficient technology to reduce or eliminate the production of a brine waste product. We had two primary goals for pureALTA and both are based on people.
Using Blockchain in Smart Cities
Blockchain has the potential to create countless smart networks and grids, altering how we do everything from vote and build credit to receive energy. In many ways, it could be a crucial component of what is needed to circumvent outdated systems and build long-lasting solutions for cities.
Take, for instance, electricity. With the help of blockchain, we can turn microgrids into a reality on a macro scale, enabling communities to more easily embrace solar power and other more sustainable sources, which in turn will result in fewer emissions and lower healthcare costs and rates of disease.
Smart Lighting Contributes Energy-Savings to Automated City Systems
Growing numbers of cities, utilities and governments are recognizing the benefits of smart lighting. In addition to energy efficiency, these advantages include reduced carbon emissions, improved public safety, improved data insights and more, leading more and more cities around the world to incorporate smart LED lighting into their automated ecosystems.
7 Recommendations from Health and Transportation Focus Groups
Planners, engineers, and public health professionals all speak different languages. They may even use different terms to express similar ideas: for example, a planner may recommend tactical urbanism to improve neighborhood walkability, whereas an engineer may ascribe experimental countermeasure terminology to the same scenario, and a public health professional may view the solution in terms of an intervention. And community members may find all these terms unintelligible. In our focus groups, we heard that practitioners need to “get people on the same page” because of the differences we carry in our heads about transportation concepts.
Why the Airport is the Future Hub of Robot Cars
For the city itself, there’s an enormous benefit in integrating intermodally with the airport. In the potential futures presented by autonomous vehicles, there’s the capacity for the airport to become essentially estranged from the city, a faraway piece of infrastructure relegated to long-haul travel, which wouldn’t be a future at all for many regional, non-coastal airports. Having the airport serve as one of the city’s core intermodal hubs draws the airport and city closer together functionally and emotionally.
The Humanability of Smart Cities
Lighting infrastructure is a perfect example of futureproofing. As cities are swapping out traditional high-pressure sodium street lights with energy-efficient LEDs and smart nodes that can remotely monitor and control the lights, don’t just be thinking about a smart lighting solution. Think about the position those streetlights are in to support so much more, like intersection safety analytics, parking optimization, and gunshot detection.
The Value of Analytics in Smart Parking
While it may sound like a simple process, there are challenges to consider when it comes to the effectiveness of parking sensors, such as their location. For example, in-ground sensors, a technology used by some cities in the past, presented a myriad of problems, including ineffective readings that can result in unreliable data and lost revenue.
How ITS and Technology Can Accelerate Making Cycling About People
Developing ITS solutions for cycling shows cyclists that they are appreciated and welcome in the city. Creating high-quality tech solutions for cyclists as a way of encouraging cycling was first tested in Denmark in 1999-2002 during the Odense Cycle City project. In addition to green waves and LED lane lights, the city and a local ITS company developed the world’s first so-called cyclist counter, which is now implemented in cities all over the world.
An Overview of California’s Water Challenges and Solutions
The groundwater basin is only 46 percent full, but that is an annual improvement thanks to reduced pumping. Beyond centralized water recycling, water reuse is also done at the building level, following zero-energy and living-design principles. Water efficiency, AMI (advanced meters), leak detection, storage, infrastructure, and IoT with sensors are all helping.