Urban Data Talks #6
Our latest Urban Data Talks event brought together a truly international line up of speakers from Taiwan, Finland and Belgium sharing their experiences working with urban data and the benefits it had to cities and communities. It was also our most subscribed to event so far, which shows the growing interested of urban data use in the community.
How Taipei uses urban data for better city making
The first talk of the session was by Roy Lin , Director of Analytics & Application at the Taipei Urban Intelligence Centre. Roy took us through an inspiring journey of how he started an initial community called InVisibleCities that tried to tackle urban challenges through data. With more open and crowdsourced data becoming available, InVisibleCities managed to produce a number of high-profile data-driven insights about Taipei that eventually grabbed the attention of Taipei City government. This ignited the creation of a data focused division within Taipei City government, into which some of his community members were recruited. This division eventually became the Taipei Urban Intelligence Centre (TUIC) in 2020. Initial work of TUIC focused on streamlining open data publication, and bringing together internal business data and data from diverse operation centres so it can be used for smarter decision making by different city agencies and services. The first major test for the freshly founded TUIC was to support Taipei cities’ COVID response, which quickly demonstrated the importance of using data for better decision making. Other work included the analysis of taxi travel data to identify hotspots to improve the placement taxi ranks, a deeper analysis of commuting patterns across a Taipei. A developed Taipei city dashboard now provides real-time comprehensive views for quick response situations, and inter-disciplinary views for longer term city planning. I was lucky enough to visit their impressive data exploration room at their centre, luckily, they have an online tour available on their website so you can get an impression of it from the comfort of your chair.
Insights from data to plan and optimise shared bike usage
Our second speaker was Merja Kajava , CEO and Founder of a Finish data analytics startup Aavista Oy. Her talk provided further insights into the micro-mobility market around the world and explained how she uses data to plan and optimize shared bike usage in cities. A major challenge represents how bike sharing providers can manage available capacity across the city based on the areas of actual demand, so they can ensure bike availability and minimise logistic challenges from balancing bikes across the city. Specifically, the talk looked into factors that affect shared bike usage in cities. As expected, some core ingrediencies for successful shared bike use involve popular events, good weather and lots of people. However, this only really stacks up if docks are available close to event spaces and if all bikes and docks are covered by the network of the same bike sharing provider. Shared bike use is likely not to occur between areas where incompatible shared bike services operate. Other examples included trend analysis of bike availability at different bike stations. Depending on the stations, large variations in the station capacity can occur on a single day. Knowledge of the historic upper and lower bounds can enable a better distribution of the bikes across different stations, enabling more rides to take place with the same number of bikes. The Avista platform has now access to data from bike sharing providers in more 220 cities across 30+ countries.
Data spaces for sustainable smart cities and communities
Our third and final speaker was Sophie Maszeros from Open and Agile Smart Cities who provided us with an update on important work across Europe on an emerging data space for sustainable cities and communities. Data spaces have become a hot topic in the Europe due to upcoming legislation such as the EU Data act and AI Act. There are now data spaces emerging for different area such as energy, mobility, health or tourism where European organisations are able to share data between each other following common governance principles. The Data Spaces for Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities (DS4SSCC) is a collaborative effort to develop a blueprint for such a data space for city data. The project explored requirements and best practices across different use cases in order to distil an initial set of guidelines for it. Examples of use cases provided by Sophie were on Optimising traffic management to reduce pollution in Amsterdam and Lisbon or the Management of energy flows in a city/community context in Barcelona. She then covered parts of the emerging blueprint specifications for the technical blueprint – covering aspects of data interoperability, data sovereignty and trust, data value creation and data spaces governance – and how they relate to the Open and Agile Smart Cities Interoperability Mechanism, the so called OASC MIMs. This blueprint will be further explored in a number of different pilots that are likely to receive funding from the Digital Europe programme early next year.
Highlights from the panel discussion
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.