City living is making a come back, and with it has come increasing congestion, longer commutes, and bad air quality. IBM’s Smarter Cities Initiative aims to take the ever growing amount of real-time data—from traditional loop sensors and GPS on buses and trains to weather data, traffic cameras, and even feedback from smart phones—and combine it with computing analytics to predict what the near future of traffic will look like in different parts of the network and make proactive interventions to alleviate the problems.

 Naveen Lamba, associate partner and Smart Transportation Leader in IBM’s Global Business Services points out that solving transportation issues involves more than just adjusting traffic signal timing.

 Lamba notes three pieces: identifying the problem, accurately telling travelers what to expect, and implementing system-wide changes to keep traffic moving. While capturing and responding to real-time data quickly enough to address an immediate problem is not feasible, the goal is more about predicting what’s going to happen in the next few minutes so adjustments can be made. Lamba says IBM has a lot of tools to handle and process situations very accurately. “Given real time traffic conditions, we can predict what up to the next 60 minutes of traffic will look like in different parts of the network,”  says Lamba.

One system

 “One of the areas that we’re focusing on is treating the whole network as one integrated multimodal system instead of trying to optimize each mode on its own, which is how it’s done today,” says Lamba. “If there’s an accident on the road, can the transit system do something to alleviate that situation?  For example, advising travelers to park and switch to public transportation where feasible. They can switch to a train and so on, and vice versa.” However, Lamba also points out there’s no single solution for every situation. “There are multiple solutions, and as many of them as you can deploy, you’ll be that much better off,” says Lamba.

Lamba points out the Smarter Cities program is a combination of initiatives from cloud services to consulting. “Each city is unique in itself and has very specific needs,” says Lamba. “Most cities start with a specific problem to gain some efficiencies. It’s up to the city whether they want a cloud-based or hosted solutions, some of which depends on their existing infrastructure.”

Dublin busses

IBM has already launched a Smart Cities initiative in several cities, including Dublin, Ireland. One piece of the Dublin project involved the bus system. By utilizing the GPS information from buses, IBM has been able to more accurately measure the arrival and departure times and pass that data on to travelers via the transportation system’s notification boards. “What we found is many cities have solutions that advise travelers of arrival and departure times on the bus stop, for example, the next bus will arrive in 12 minutes. And that counter will keep going down as the bus gets closer. But what ends up happening is those 12 minutes may take 18 minutes to tick down to zero if the bus got delayed at some point in its route, or may continue to show an arrival time of x number of minutes even if the bus has already arrived. This is what contributes to traveler frustration and a lack of trust in the system. To regain that trust is very hard. By increasing the arrival time accuracy, traveler satisfaction is improved.”

IBM was unable to comment on whether the changes have resulted in increased ridership. The problem is the problem keeps evolving. “In Dublin, solutions are being deployed continually, but the rate of increase in cars and traffic has continued to grow pretty fast. By the time a solution is deployed,  traffic has outpaced those deployments. So it’s hard to measure improvements because by the time you implement a vertical type of solution, you’re not dealing with the same traffic you were when you started that solution.” Lamba also points out the reverse is true in the U.S.  “Traffic is actually tapering off”, says Lamba. “This  allows you to deploy solutions and actually see some benefit out of it.”

More for less

Other cities are also pursuing a Smarter Cities program. IBM see cities and citizens expecting a higher level of accountability but neither wants spending to increase. Lamba says, “Analytics-based, data-driven technology platforms can help cities provide a higher level of service to their citizens while either keeping costs the same or actually even lowering them.  We think it’s not going to be a choice. Cities will almost be forced into it because the demands on the city’s physical infrastructure are going to continue to increase as more and more people move to cities.  In order to meet that demand, the physical infrastructure footprint is going to increase very slowly, so you have to use approaches like the Smarter Cities approach to be able to handle the higher demand.”

Other programs are also close to being realized. USDOT’s  Connected Vehicle Initiative involves establishing standards for vehicles to communicate with each other. Later this year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to rule on this initiative mandating certain types of safety features in cars that are aligned with this connected vehicle type technology.  Lamba adds, “There are also going to be sensors on the physical infrastructure itself. For example, an intersection would always know how many vehicles are approaching from which direction at what speed and would continually optimize the green signal timing so that the throughput through the intersection is maximized at all times.”

IBM’s focus has been figuring out how to leverage all the data that’s out there. Lamba says, “The computing power, the analytics power, is greater than it has ever been. The question is how do you harness that capability to get the most out of existing assets that we have. How do you leverage all the data that’s out there and make quick actionable decisions that can improve the efficiency of a system?  The goal is to adopt analytics-based solutions with a net effect similar to adding a lane to a highway, for example, but at a much lower price point and a much shorter period of time.”

The dream of better traffic control has been around forever. In the 1950s, Popular Science magazine would regularly feature stories about how, in the future, traffic control will be so much better and traffic jams will be eliminated. Smarter Cities would appear to be a viable option to reaching this transportation nirvana.