Benchmarking “Smart City” Technology Adoption in California: An Innovative Web Platform for Exploring New Data and Tracking Adoption

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

August 19, 2020 - August 18, 2021

Principal Investigator

Areas of Expertise

Intelligent Transportation Systems, Emerging Technologies, & Big Data

Campus(es)

UC Berkeley

Project Summary

In recent years, “smart city” technologies have emerged to help cities, special districts, and other public agencies prolong the life of their infrastructure, communicate with citizens, and provide more effective services. Common transportation examples include intelligent traffic signal priority systems and publicly-shared general transit specification feeds. Comprehensive data regarding the uptake of such technologies is essential for policymakers and engineers to make careful choices about technology design and adoption, yet it is limited. While consultancies such as the McKinsey Global Institute have created “smart cities indices,” these and other existing indices aggregate propriety data according to non-transparent formulas. They are also one-time studies that cannot show longitudinal change, and do not offer coverage of smaller towns and cities alongside major metropolitan areas. A UCITS SB1 2019-2020 grant funded our initial work to develop and pilot a methodology for building this dataset. In this grant application, we propose to conduct extensive data collection using this research methodology to build: 1) a comprehensive and transparent dataset measuring technology adoption across California, and; 2) develop a long-term strategy for sustainable data collection over time. This research project falls under research priority Section D: Innovative Mobility.