Benchmarking “Smart City” Technology Adoption in California: An Innovative Web Platform for Exploring New Data and Tracking Adoption
Research Team: Alison Post (lead), Ishana Ratan, Mary Hill, Amy Huang, Kenichi Soga, and Bingyu Zhao
UC Campus(es): UC Berkeley
Problem Statement: Smart city technologies are increasingly empowering cities, utilities, and other local public agencies to improve the resiliency, efficiency, and transparency of services. In transportation, examples include mobile apps for integrated payment across public transportation services and on-demand microtransit with real-time schedules accessible to riders. Comprehensive data regarding the adoption of new “smart city” technologies is essential for policymakers and engineers to make careful choices about deploying this technology. However, there are gaps in existing indices for measuring the adoption of these technologies. Many indices use proprietary data, do not allow users to disaggregate subcomponents of the index, and provide limited tools for data visualization.
Project Description: This project developed an innovative user-friendly web interface for local and state policymakers that tracks and displays information on the adoption of such technologies in California across the policing, transportation, and water and wastewatersectors for a comprehensive set of local service providers: connectedgov.berkeley.edu. Contrary to conventional smart city indices, our platform allows users to view rates of adoption in maps that attribute adoption to the local public agencies or service providers actually procuring or regulating the technologies in question. Users can construct indices or view technologies one by one. Users can also explore the relationship between technology adoption and local service area conditions and demographics, or download the raw data and scripts used to collect it. This report illustrates the utility of the data we have collected, and the analytics one can perform using our web interface through an analysis of the rollout of three technologies in the transportation sector: electric vehicle (EV) chargers, transportation network company (TNC) service areas, and micro-mobility services across California.
Status: Completed
Budget: $55,356