To help city planners kill traffic jams, US agency turns to Sidewalk Labs

The Alphabet-backed research group wants to quantify commute, quality of life.

Megan Geuss – Mar 17, 2016 6:56 pm | 27

On Thursday, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it would partner with Sidewalk Labs, a city-focused research group that’s a subsidiary of Alphabet (formerly known as Google), to give one US city an overhaul of its traffic analytics infrastructure.

The two institutions said they’d give the chosen city free access to a new analytics platform developed by Sidewalk Labs called Flow, which takes data from Google Maps and a variety of unspecified sensors to tell city planners which areas of the city are congested, which would be better served by mass transit, and where the city’s transportation resources should be pooled.

The city that gets access to Flow will be the winner of the Smart City Challenge, an ongoing contest sponsored by the DOT in which participant cities must show that they have plans to work technology into their existing transportation network. The finalist cities include Austin, TX; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Kansas City, MO; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, OR; and San Francisco, CA.

DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx underscored the importance of using technology to solve transportation problems in urban centers at today’s press conference. “Inefficiencies in transportation cost Americans over 40 hours stuck in traffic every year,” Foxx said, adding that “low income Americans spend nearly a quarter of their income on transportation, while high income Americans spend 10 percent of their income on transportation.” A “smart city,” the DOT hopes, will be able to smooth out those imbalances by deploying public transportation more efficiently and finding ways to stop traffic jams at problem intersections.

Because it’s an analytics platform, Flow will only be available to city planners at first. Regular folks on the ground would benefit from the software in a more abstract way, but Sidewalk Labs and the DOT said they’d also buy the winning city 100 Wi-Fi kiosks outfitted with Android tablets, similar to the ones recently deployed by LinkNYC (a project that was developed by Sidewalk Labs). The kiosks will be deployed in underserved neighborhoods first and will offer “free Wi-Fi and real-time transit information, helping citizens without a smartphone or data plan use new dynamic mobility services,” a press release on the partnership said.

“The kiosks also perform anonymized sensing, helping route drivers directly to available parking, and allowing cities to adjust transit routes based on real-time rider demand, or change traffic patterns to respond to congestion.”

Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff stressed that privacy “is a defining issue” for the research group going forward, noting that “the sensors that we’re talking about for the most part are environmental sensors.”

“In order to collect some of the data we’re going to have to have some kind of camera,” Doctoroff admitted, “we’re going to have to work with the cities on that, but our interest is really in having anonymized data.”

Sidewalk Labs and the DOT also said that the sensors on the kiosks could be used to test autonomous vehicles, although the two institutions did not elaborate on exactly how those cars would benefit from communicating with the kiosks, besides giving city planners greater information about what kinds of cars are driving where, and when.

But that’s in the future, and the DOT wants to use Sidewalk Labs’ Flow today to reduce traffic. “There may be no bigger problem than the problem of congestion,” Doctoroff said today. “We’re all experiencing it in almost every city, meanwhile we’re struggling even more to provide equitable travel options.”

Correction: This article originally stated that Flow will take data from Waze as part of its analytics platform. However, Waze is not a partner with Flow at this time.