A little stale but an interesting deployment of citywide sensor tech:
The City will be installing smart nodes that can use real-time anonymous sensor data to do things such as direct drivers to open parking spaces, help first responders during emergencies, track carbon emissions and identify intersections that can be improved for pedestrians and cyclists. The information can be used to support San Diego’s “Vision Zero” strategy to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries.
… The anonymous information from the sensors can be used by developers to create apps and software that can benefit the community.
I’m curious how such apps would be built and managed. At least from the building part, feels like a project at the UC Berkeley RISE lab might be applicable:
A critical part of enabling cities to implement their Vision Zero policies – the goal of the current National Transportation Data Challenge – is to be able to generate open, multi-modal travel experience data. While existing datasets use police and hospital reports to provide a comprehensive picture of fatalities and life altering injuries, by their nature, they are sparse and resist use for prediction and prioritization. Further, changes to infrastructure to support Vision Zero policies frequently require balancing competing needs from different constituencies – protected bike lanes, dedicated signals and expanded sidewalks all raise concerns that automobile traffic will be severely impacted.
… The e-mission project in the RISE and BETS labs focuses on building an extensible platform that can instrument the end-to-end multi-modal travel experience at the personal scale, collate it for analysis at the societal scale, and help solve some of the challenges above.