Urban Data Talks #5
After a lengthy break, the fifth edition of the community event finally returned again for the first time this year to kickstart hopefully a more active remainder of the year.
We had three speakers join us for the evening. Our first speaker, Chris Fowler from Sandscape Geospatial, shared insights on measuring social impact of pollution. With a strong background in location data analytics for place makers and retail, Chris discussed challenges of balancing geographic coverage with a need for precise traffic and environmental data.
Our second speaker, Kris Vanherle shareed his story of building Telraam, a large crowd-sourced platform of traffic counting devices that empowers a growing international community of citizens to influence local mobility policy.
Our third speaker of the night, Sarah Gallacher from Urban Data Collective explained the challenges of local authorities in providing a reliable public EV charge point infrastructure and how urban data streams from charge point providers, smart parking infrastructure and energy systems combined can offer significant insights and benefits for improving their operation.
Below is a summary of the three talks and the discussions that followed.
Measuring the social impact of air quality
Chris Fowler kicked off the evening with some exploratory work on how air quality affects footfall and customer spending behaviour in cities. Since Victorian times, areas in city centres have seen populations with larger deprivation but are exposed to higher air pollution. The latter is partially contributed to commuting behaviours of wealthier citizens who live outside but work and shop in city centres, the use of wood burners etc. There are clear indications that poor air quality affects footfall and shopping behaviours. Shops at prime city locations are increasingly affected and worried about this trend. Hyperlocal air quality and footfall data can now be increasingly gathered using emerging IoT systems and provide more insights into this phenomena. However, there are challenges related to the reliable collection of such data and providing this at scale. Work carried out in Antwerp by Sparrow, mytraffic and Newgrove explores how mobile and low-cost sensing systems can provide more granularity at the expense of accuracy but requires careful data management for meaningful insights.
Telraam: collecting traffic counting data with citizens
Next, Kris Vanherle presented his work on gathering traffic data with a low-cost sensing solution called Telraam, that he and his team developed. Telraam is able to provide more granular and continuous traffic insights across cities in an affordable way. Over several iterations he developed an optical traffic counting and classification system based on a single board computer that can be deployed inside of people’s homes by attaching them to a window that faces the street. Video data is processed at the edge, from which traffic counts, vehicle types and traveling speed are derived. This data is then crowdsourced to a data platform, where further deeper analysis can be performed. The data is openly accessible via APIs. Such citizen-science based approaches allow cities to engage their communities into finding solutions to local traffic problems and build up a more holistic and continuous picture of traffic in different neighbourhoods. Kris discusses several case studies in how the use of Telraam allowed traffic speed reductions in neighborhoods and helped understand shifts in traffic behaviour and modality before and after the pandemic.
Cities In Charge: How urban data can improve the operation of Public EV charge point infrastructure
The final talk by Sarah Gallacher presented Cities In Charge, a data-driven decision support tool developed by Urban Data Collective for local authorities and cities to optimise the rollout of public EV charge points and their operation after deployment. The UK’s EV charging infrastructure requires a 10-fold increase over the next 7 years to support the ambitious targets set for decarbonisation by the government. However there are significant challenges not only for achieving a successful rollout, but for ensuring that citizens and the public obtain best value from its operation in decades to come. By combining real time data from EV charge point provider backends, smart parking sensors and energy data, new insights can be obtained that ensure an adequate level of EV charging infrastructure service can be provided to the public in a cost-efficient way. Cities in Charge provides actionable insights about performance of the charging infrastructure and user behaviours at charging bays, allowing increased revenues, cheaper enforcement operations and more effective management of supplier SLAs. It also provides reporting automation needed for netzero reporting such as emission saving and insights for optimisation of energy tariffs.
Highlights from the panel
The panel discussion that followed addressed a number of questions from the audience. The study by Chris Fowler highlighted the fact that it is the wealthiest who actually contribute proportionally more air pollution in cities but are the ones most sensitive about being exposed to it. It will be interesting to see if shops and retail outlets catering towards this target group can incentivise more sustainable travel behaviour of their customers. Next the discussion focused on Telraam’s business model. Although the user of the traffic counting device is the citizen, the customers are mainly local authorities who often pay for the infrastructure and distribute it to the residents. Public data access is provided via APIs at an hourly aggregate. In future the system will support granularities of up to every 15 minutes. Finally, a discussion briefly touched upon why local authorities should work with multiple charge point providers. Tenders for such infrastructure are set over 10-20 years. Only going with a single charge point provider stifles competition and can have a negative effect on infrastructure reliability and competitive pricing, leaving local residents exposed.
This concluded another excellent evening with insightful talks. We are looking forward to the next edition of the event with more case studies from the community about the benefits of urban data use.