Dive Brief:
- Kansas City, MO, has launched a public data portal for viewing real-time traffic data and locating open parking spots as part of its Smart City Initiative, according to Curbed.
- Cisco and Sprint provided $15.7 million in funding for a sensor array along the city’s 2.2-mile smart district designed to provide insights into next-generation infrastructure opportunities.
- Despite losing out to Columbus, OH, in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s $40 million Smart City Challenge, Kansas City continues to invest in data collection and analysis for optimized vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
Dive Insight:
As part of Kansas City’s $100 million downtown streetcar line, the city’s smart district has emerged as a model for leveraging sensor and video capture technology for analyzing and optimizing traffic flow by measuring car and foot traffic along with relative population flow through the smart zone.
Meanwhile, Columbus was the winner of the USDOT's $40 million Smart City Challenge grant, which will be deployed to realize that city’s vision of connected infrastructure, electric vehicle charging and autonomous vehicles all plugged into an integrated data platform. Columbus will collaborate with other Smart City Challenge finalists including Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland and San Francisco to share and scale successful best practices.
Both public and private capital continues to flow into the smart city sector. In November 2016, the outgoing Obama Administration pledged $80 million to smart city research and development, while phase one of the $500 million Gramercy District smart city outside of Washington, DC, continues to add project partners in an effort to be up and running by 2017. Globally, the market for smart building technology is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 34% to reach almost $25 billion by 2021.
