What it means to be a smart city in 2018

By Warren Miller, contributing writer

The word “smart” can seemingly precede anything these days. We have smartphones, smart TVs, and smart homes — a series of common things progressively larger in size and scope moving into the smart domain. We can get even larger, too — smart cities have become a part of the lexicon now. What exactly makes a city smart? Below are a few examples of what smart cities can offer.

Residents or visitors to any major urban area know how difficult it can be to find parking, but many cities around the world are incorporating smart meters. These are parking stations that allow citizens to find available parking spaces using an app available for their cellphones. These meters accept many forms of digital payment and will even send a text alert when your time is about to run out, allowing you to pay for more time from wherever you are. The days of running out to the meter to put more coins into the slot will soon be a thing of the past.

Staying in the realm of transportation, monitoring technology is commonly used to ease the flow of traffic depending on circumstances. If traffic is particularly heavy in one direction, a computer can modify the traffic light intervals to allow more automobiles to pass through intersections. Public transit schedules can also be modified to adjust for periods of heavy use, like during rush hour or before or after sporting events. This is particularly useful in cities where public transportation is an integral part of the everyday commute, as any New Yorker would gladly confirm.

Smart cities use technology to improve energy efficiency. Image source: Pixabay.

Major urban areas can be huge energy consumers, but smart cities are using technology to improve energy efficiency. Traffic and streetlights can be dimmed (or even turned off) during hours when their functionality is unnecessary. Monitoring energy grids can result in better distribution of energy resources and also detect areas that require preventative maintenance, solving smaller problems before they become bigger ones. Similar monitoring technology can also detect burgeoning faults in roadways and on bridges, saving potentially millions in future repair costs.

Sustainability has also become a watchword in smart cities, as it has everywhere else. Many people generate lots of waste, and smart cities are working to lower their collective carbon footprint by endorsing large composting programs and reducing the amount of waste from large construction and public works programs. Water-recycling and desalination programs are also becoming more ubiquitous, with cities like Melbourne, Australia, leading the way to augmenting their own water supplies.

Believe it or not, smart cities are even using artificial intelligence (AI) to aid in their digital development. Alibaba recently implemented its own smart city AI platform in Kuala Lumpur, a system that the company has been developing with the cooperation of the city of Hangzhou, China, since 2016. The platform accumulates and analyzes massive amounts of data collected from video and still-image cameras and other monitoring systems all over the city and makes recommendations to city officials on ways to improve things like traffic and public safety.

While the cost of upgrading a city’s systems and infrastructure can be extensive, it is widely believed that the smart upgrades will pay for themselves in the long run. Less traffic begets shorter commutes, which, in turn, results in more productive work days, and better energy efficiency lowers energy costs. Technology is ideally supposed to improve everyday human life, and smart cities are leading the way thanks to designers and engineers developing these new smart technologies and products.