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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
3/29/2016 10:16:15 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Moving cars in also important
Enormous numbers of inefficiencies (like circling looking for parking) could be reduced or eliminated; it's really hard to imagine how precise the system could become. One big use I look forward to is close to 100% recycling: Acme Manufacturing needs 92.4 tons of aluminum, so rather than buy a 100-ton lot, they contact a middleman who arranges for  recycling robots at the municipal plants  nearest the remelting plant to route exactly that much aluminum to the plant .... no shortage and no scrap. 

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
3/29/2016 10:11:07 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Another use for smart cities...
And those directional lights  could work all the way down to finding a lost child on camera and directing the kid and the parents back together (i.e. moving just 3 people) and all the way up to having the Big One hit with almost no death toll (assuming they ever get earthquake prediction to be reliable).  But my point somewhere back there, which I guess I should pretend to remember, is that large parts of the difference are still made by the publicity generated by some killer app.  Worldwide fascination with automobiles went even higher after the Battle of the Marne, in which the taxi drivers of Paris delivered a whole army to the front much faster than it could have marched or ridden horseback, and Paris was saved. Radio got a big boost by saving some of the Titanic victims.  Genetic mapping gets great PR out of its role in crime investigations.  Those are not the most important things those technologies did or do. They're just the most dramatic.

So, want to predict which parts of IoT will come fastest? Think about the ones the talking heads won't be able to stop talking about.

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
3/29/2016 10:03:30 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Another use for smart cities...
Elizabethv, I think the question of whether people will tolerate replacing the almost-new old technology with the completely new technology is something that turns on very small points, historically.  Ben Franklin proposed the Pony Express while he was Postmaster General, but it was more than 70 years before it was implemented (when it became clear that a nation newly 3000 miles across with ciites on both coasts couldn't rely on communicating via clipper ships traveling all the way around the Horn or old Zeke and his mule walking there). It lasted all of 18 months; then the Civil War forced an immediate interest in newfangled stuff like railroads and telegraph.  Think of all those highly trained riders thrown out of work! Imagine all those fast smart ponies that the taxpayer had already paid for.

I'm so old I can remember when everyone knew that DOS would never replace CP/M because there were already 50,000 commercial "programs" (apps, for you youngsters) and well over THREE MILLION users in the installed base. A similar argument with zeros in different places was made about going from command line interfaces to GUI. And the US railroad industry after WW2 barely showed up to argue with the truck&highway and airplane lobbies, because, after all, one flatbed car can carry 4-6 semi trailers at a fraction of the energy cost and without menacing automobilie drivers, and why would anyone take 12 hours crossing the country (at propeller plane speeds) when he could spend five days on a train?

 

AND YET ...

Vinyl LPs are back in part because vast swarms of people already owned sounds they wanted on LP and insisted on having a way to play them, and once stereos were back, people started making phonographs again, other people started recording for them. Paper books obstinately hang on against ebooks. Professional baseball won't accept the aluminum bat. Musicians spend fortunes on tube amps and have for decades.

So my real guess is it's going to depend a lot.  Some features of smart cities and of IoT will probably be adapted at once, and whatever pre-existing investment there was thrown away. Some will probably be "the tech of the future" very far into the future. And though the cost of the installed base will be a factor, based on history, I don't think it is likely to be the deciding factor.

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inkstainedwretch
inkstainedwretch
3/29/2016 7:51:03 PM
User Rank
Gold
Re: Another use for smart cities...
Traffic management / evacuation. One IoT proposal I've heard about is installing municipal lighting systems that can be used not just for lighting, but as indicators. If you want to draw people away from a disaster area, you can delineate a route (or routes) with different colored lights.

--Brian Santo

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ms.akkineni
ms.akkineni
3/29/2016 5:52:03 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Another use for smart cities...
@elizabethv:

The balace between technology and finance surely should exist. But I don't believe that alone can set the path clear for smart features for cities. As he outlined in the interview there are bunch of other things; one being regulatory related readiness. Prior to making something practical i believe getting buy in from both local municipalities and state is critical. And for that the process would be larger than a concept, I would guess. But that shouldn't stop the effort. But all I would like to say is we are still not there yet and it will take more time to get that path clear.

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ms.akkineni
ms.akkineni
3/29/2016 5:45:58 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Moving cars in also important
@carol:

Very True. The smart feature you highlighted for parking is a very practical situation especially for NYC. It would be lot of time saved if you think about all those one ways and how much you need to drive around to get by. I believe that is very much achievable solution. Ofcourse there could be exceptions where there could be some private paeking spots that are sold adhoc by some folks. But majority of the parking could be centrally stored / tracked and that tracker can be made available to people may be at spots like near bridges, tunnels etc and online or mobile space.

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wilson@lightreading.com
wilson@lightreading.com
3/29/2016 5:35:51 PM
User Rank
Author
Moving cars in also important
One of the things that appeals most to me is the idea that cars can be quickly directed to where there is available parking and time isn't spent searching for parking spaces or garages that aren't full. 

There are a host of possible applications around moving vehicles into and out of a city more efficiently that seem to make sense, both for city planners and city residents.

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elizabethv
elizabethv
3/29/2016 7:40:59 AM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: Another use for smart cities...
@JohnBarnes your point of the usefulness of a smart city during some kind of impending catastrophe to evacuate the city is a valid one. Still, I believe the argument of feasibility is a viable one. You can't just go around replacing street lights on a street if they were just replaced and still functional. People would demand to know why their tax dollars were being spent so wrecklessly. There has to be a balance of implementing change for the greater good versus being financially responsible. A city that goes bankrupt and ends up looking like Detriot will be significantly easier to evacuate than a city in a population boom like Denver. 

Is it possible to balance new technological changes with financial responsibilty? Will it be enough should a disaster strike? 

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
3/28/2016 8:52:16 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Another use for smart cities...
One big problem with cities, especially high-density living areas, is that it's hard to get people out of them (or more usually out of parts of them)  in a hurry when you need to. Watch the news from any hurricane or flood, or for cities suddenly struck by chemical accidents, terrorist attacks, or big fires.  It is very hard to move people out of urban areas in a short time.  That's one place where smart cities would not only make a huge difference, and probably one that people would demand after the first few times it worked.  The first time a smart city evacuates hundreds of thousands of people from the path of a disaster within an hour or two, the traditional  solution to urban vulnerability  -- i.e. hoping that it doesn't happen while you live there if you're a citizen, or on your watch if you're an official -- is going to look shabby indeed, and every city that isn't already equipped for smart-city traffic and transport control is going to be getting equipped ASAP.

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