SMART CITIES AND SHARED STREETS

July 26, 2020 · by · in

Smart Cities

Urban planning involves various processes like arrangement and designing of buildings, transport systems, public spaces as well as good amenities. Nowadays, cities are getting overpopulated day by day and resources are getting scarce. To develop land, urban planners utilize goal settings, data collection, analysis, forecasting, and consultation. Technology becomes increasingly important in urban planning as the consequences of city development, as well as the and ongoing changes, need to be projected.

First, the Smart Citizen is a platform that provides an alternative to centralized data production and management systems used by large companies, forming the driving force behind the smart city concept. The project enables ordinary citizens to collect information about their environment and open it to the public. The reason why it is important is that the project develops tools for citizens to take action on environmental monitoring and develops community engagement and co-creation approaches. The project has helped local communities to make sense of their environment and address environmental problems in air, soil and sound pollution. It connects people with their environments and their city to create more effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology, communities, services and events in the urban environment. This project has been successfully deployed in the city of Barcelona and in Amsterdam.

Also, the U-sound sensors are important in urban planning. In the city of León, located in the province of Guanajuato in México, it has the deployment of a network of 400 sensors to remotely monitor and manage the most critical parameters identified by the municipal services: air quality, noise, mobility and street lighting. The Smart City project includes 20 Urbiotica U-Sound sensors which are continuously monitoring today the noise levels in the hyper center to detect and alert about possible discomfort and incidents due to very loud music, disturbances, signs of distress, among others. The aim of the project is to create an innovative ecosystem through the effective use of technology to make decisions based on real data.

 

Shared Streets

In Chicago, The city’s Department of Transportation is temporarily converting some roads into “shared streets,” which will accommodate walkers, runners, bikers and only local car traffic. Argyle Street is Chicago’s first shared street, creating a plaza-like feel by raising the street and eliminating curbs. The innovative streetscape includes unit pavers that delineate sidewalks at street level, and features sidewalk planters, bike racks, and large pedestrian areas that allow for sidewalk cafes, gathering, and interacting.

The Pedestrian Priority Street is a design concept and policy approach developed in Seoul, South Korea. In particular, it seeks to transform narrow and busy street networks to promote shared use and protect pedestrians. First, the evolution of the PPS concept is described. The design, construction and evaluation of the two PPS pilot projects in 2013 were presented, and eight additional projects completed in 2014 were briefly described. At the end of this chapter, some reflections are made on the future of PPS, including suggestions on the benefits of an integrated approach. The evaluation of the PPS pilot project showed a significant increase in overall satisfaction of street users receiving treatment and a slight decrease in vehicle speed. Notably, observational studies have shown a decrease in the incidence of dangerous pedestrian approach to vehicles. This indicates that the general likelihood of pedestrian and automobile accidents is reduced and driver behavior changes significantly. Other interesting findings related to the need to involve communities in decision-making on shared street design and the need to design streets to reflect the need for surrounding land use. Seoul’s PPS reflects a new era of shared street design and implementation, elevating streets to locality rather than simply passing fast boulevards. The design concept can be applied to any street, but especially for those seeking to transform narrow, car-oriented streets to attract pedestrians and car users more in a more balanced manner.

The future of urban roads may be one where motorists, pedestrians and cyclists act as one. Spaces where these usually segregated members of the population to live, or move by the same rules. Most importantly, these rules would be social, not formal, to befit the increasingly popular trend of shared space. “Shared space breaks the principle of segregation,” says Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a street designer who coined the term with the late Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. The town of Drachten in the Netherlands was one of the first to experiment the concept in 2002 by removing nearly all traffic signals with the aim of reducing accidents and improving both the towns quality and popularity. Despite increases in traffic volumes, accident numbers fell from 8.3 per year between 1994 and 2002 to an average of just one per year in 2005.