Enthusiasm Waning for Smart Cities, Autonomous Vehicles, CES Hears
LAS VEGAS -- Enthusiasm for smart cities has been scaled down at recent CESs as cities encounter hurdles, said Brian Collie, Boston Consulting Group senior partner, on a panel Monday. Enthusiasm has also waned for autonomous vehicles, he said. Speakers agreed that to be a success, smart cities need a push, starting at the federal level.
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Collie said there's no question there are problems smart cities need to solve. There are 1.3 million traffic deaths yearly worldwide, and that will get worse with smartphones and distracted driving, he said. Global warming is also a concern. Towns all want data, but most don’t have capability to use it, Collie said.
“There’s a lot of interest -- this room is jam-packed,” said former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, now at DLA Piper. “You have to have political leadership. You have to have mayors and governors who are willing to say we have a vision.” Leadership is needed at the federal level, he said. “Resources have to be partnered from Washington,” he said: “Cities are cash strapped, states are cash strapped.”
Autonomous vehicles will be trucks first “because it’s easier,” LaHood said. Every car company is focused on the technology, he noted.
By 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities and that’s something cities must address, said Clara Fain, chief financial officer at on-demand transit provider Via. “Autonomous is not happening today, it’s pretty clear,” she said: “The most advanced companies in the world are investing a lot of money … to make sure it happens and I believe they’ll be successful.” Cities need to be prepared, as less than 2 percent of city budgets are invested in transportation and IT, she said.
Smart city can mean many things, said Carlo Ratti, consultant and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher. The biggest thing in the internet is becoming the IoT and it's “entering the physical space of the city,” he said. We can now can collect a lot of data and analyze it using artificial intelligence, he said. You can use the data for energy, municipal services and transportation, he said: “We can change the way a city moves.” IoT was also a topic at the show (see 2001060028).
In mobility, you don’t know what will succeed, Ratti said. Three years ago here, everyone was “super excited” about dockless bikes that could be shared using a smartphone, he said. “Now, most of them are a bust” and there are bike “cemeteries” across China, he said.
Municipalities face different challenges, said Giovanni Moscatelli, Boston Consulting managing director. Finding parking spaces is a problem in places like Singapore, but not in cities being built from scratch with lots of land available, he said. In many places, there's much data that's not interconnected, he said. ”We are putting a lot of pressure on the municipalities and their ability to drive into this uncertainty.” he said. Cities have to make decisions about the technology they want to pursue, and work on regulation, he said. They need to identify partners and somehow find money, he said.
Flying cars, expected to be a big theme at the show, illustrate the need for cooperation, said Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data. “There is a huge new raft of in-city transportation startups” that want to offer transportation in the most congested places, she said. “You cannot have a flying thing take off in a city without federal and city regulatory buy in." Collaboration between cities and the FAA has been working, she said. Flying cars on a mass scale may never work, for reasons including physics, she said. “The collaboration is what we should emulate.”