A Smart City is one that gives you options
Multiple modes made easy
More than a decade ago, Smart Cities were all the rage. Large tech companies saw a big opportunity to deploy senors, cameras, edge computers, and other Internet of Things devices all over cities. Their marketing promised that connecting cities and collecting all this new data would make them smarter. And smarter meant better.
John Lorinc’s book Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopia goes into great detail about why things didn’t go as planned. More connectivity and more data doesn’t necessarily lead to a better experience for people in cities. Better outcomes can only happen when you take several big steps back and figure out what a better city actually means. What problems are you trying to solve? How can technology help to solve these problems? What else, besides technology, is needed to solve these problems? Without this kind of first-principles approach, you’ll certainly end up with all kinds of uncoordinated outcomes that don’t solve anything.
More on that another time.
Recently, I’ve been reading and listening to many prominent planners, officials, and community leaders debate the merits of bike lanes, transit priority, pedestrian-friendly streets, road safety, and traffic congestion. This is a complex and important debate with many strong points of view on many sides of the arguments. For example, take Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s attempt to remove bike lanes in Toronto versus former Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s successful transportation of New York City with bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. While Ford says he is not against bike lanes, he wants them relegated to streets where they won’t cause cars to experience more congestion. Sadik-Khan’s view is that bike lanes improve the quality of everyone’s experience of the city, and this is more important than prioritizing cars.
These are two of the most opposite points of view you’ll find on this topic, but at the same time, both Ford and Sadik-Khan want to improve cities. They both want cities to be places where people can thrive, have positive expeirences, work, get around, and enjoy themselves. The fundamental difference between the two is the amount of choice they want individuals to have. Ford wants to remove choice by designing streets where only one mode of transportation—driving—is permitted. Sadik-Khan wants to add choices by designing streets where multiple modes of transportation—driving, cycling, and walking—are encouraged.
That brings us back to the concept of smart cities. One way of making a city “smart” is to design it to allows for the maximum amount of choice. Every city inhabitant can choose to drive, cycle, walk, or take transit. They can choose different modes for different trips each day depending on how they’re feeling, the weather, where they’re going, whether there are disruptions, or anything else they care about. Rather than designing a city to limit these choices, a smart city encourages variety and becomes dynamic, agile, and vibrant.