Smart Communities Resources

The 2021 ITE Developing Trends Report represents collective input from ITE Councils and Standing Committees on emerging transportation challenges and solutions. The report covers transportation planning, engineering, management, and operation advancements and will benefit the industry's leaders and professionals in the public and private sectors. The Developing Trends Report Task Force reached out to all ITE Councils and Standing Committees to identify trends relevant to their scope and expertise.

Celebrating public agencies during United for Infrastructure week

Sustainable Transportation: An ITE Technical Brief

Convener: Bill Schultheiss, Toole Design

Convener: Mark Johnson, MTJ Engineering

Creating a thriving downtown is about leveraging your assets. The greatest asset of a community is its people: residents, business owners, visitors, civic leaders, and other stakeholders. Strategic and meaningful engagement with them is vital to long-term sustainability of any planning and revitalization process. Today, planners are constantly challenged to find new and creative ways to engage the public. Planners from firm Greenman-Pedersen, Inc. in New York, NY, USA, for example, are using a diverse set of tools from traditional workshops and meetings, to walk audits and online tools, to high-quality visualizations and virtual reality scenarios, to support two complimentary planning studies, both of which advance the revitalization efforts of a downtown area in New York state.

Design guides available to today's transportation professionals are highly sophisticated when it comes to almost all design elements: every truck turn can be sketched, industry accessibility guidelines wrestle through a myriad of competing treatments for different needs, and all land uses have a well-documented trip pattern.

Case Studies: Smart Communities - Austin, TX; Colorado; and Columbus, OH

When it comes to smart cities, people have very different ideas about what the concept means. Generally, though, a smart city is one that incorporates technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), GPS tracking, and the Internet of Things (IoT) into its physical infrastructure in order to improve public services and provide its citizens with a safer lifestyle.

Our communities are building future capabilities today in real life, while the reel life in cinema has been imagining it for decades. In the 2002 film Minority Report, Tom Cruise (as John Anderton) gets personalized advertising directed to him based on retinal scan identification while walking in a shopping mall. In the 2004 film I, Robot Will Smith (as Del Spooner) rides in an all-electric Audi that operates in semi-autonomous mode and uses underground freeways that move traffic away from above-ground streets. In one scene, a couple is traveling in what looks like a short-trip specialty flying vehicle.

In 2012 the City of Boise, ID, USA sponsored the 30th Street Area Master Plan to propose land use revitalization and infrastructure improvements to an area west of Downtown Boise. This plan's vision was to promote walkable, people-oriented, mixed-use neighborhoods through redevelopment; enhance mobility for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists; and enhance the local street network. The plan included a key recommendation for the Fairview Avenue and Main Street one-way couplet to reduce the number of vehicle lanes in each direction from four to three. This would allow flexibility to enhance alternate transportation modes and would revitalize this older part of town through reimagined transportation facilities and redevelopment opportunities.

2018 National Rural ITS and ITS Arizona Annual Conference + Exhibit October 21-24, 2018 | We-Ko-Pa Conference Center | Fort McDowell, AZ

Shared mobility describes “transportation services that are shared among users, including public transit; taxis and limos; bikesharing; carsharing (round-trip, one-way, and personal vehicle sharing); ridesharing (carpooling, vanpooling); ridesourcing/ride-splitting; scooter sharing; shuttle services; neighborhood jitneys; and more.” These emerging transportation services, often based on newly available technology, are growing rapidly in Smart Cities and Communities.

Transportation’s Role in Public Health Transportation plays an important role in health, well-being, and quality of life. The transportation system provides access to goods and services critical to health such as affordable/healthy foods, health care, education, and career opportunities. Active transportation options are known to increase physical activity, reduce obesity, and lower rates of disease. Transportation is a top contributor to urban air pollution, with major impacts to respiratory and lung health. The transportation system has a significant impact on the health of our communities.

Equity in transportation refers to the equitable distribution of benefits, burdens, and costs of our policies and infrastructure investments. In today’s society, public agencies are challenged with ensuring the long-term viability and livability of their community and that all citizens, regardless of race, income, gender, age, or ability, have equal access to employment and social services. Transportation and Smart Communities can play a role in addressing social equity through a variety of means.

Team building for a “Smart” Team isn’t really different than building any other type of project team. Turning a group of individuals with their own agendas and goals into a strong and organized group working towards the common goal of building a Smart Community is the most important part of creating a Smart Team.

The very first step a community can do on its progression to becoming a Smart Community is know what data it already has and how these data can be gathered, manipulated, and made usable. Then, identifying data your community seeks is a key step. This will have to be done in tandem with some of the areas below, particularly with the focus of the plan. Finally, identify your partners (people who will help get you where you need to go), stakeholders (those who will benefit and use the smart aspects), and potential opponents and obstacles.

No Such Thing as Too Small When you hear about “Smart” initiatives in the news, do you instantly picture places like Boston, MA; San Francisco, CA; or Chicago, IL? Only large cities with advanced traffic management centers, huge transit systems, and populations in the millions could possibly have the need and resources for building “smart” solutions, right? The truth is that most communities are working to improve efficiencies and quality of life, including communities with less than 5,000 residents, and even some of those small communities are applying technology to those goals. Sometimes it is the small communities leading the way with new technologies, because implementation is simpler at that scale to test out new ideas.