IBM Smarter Cities Recommendations
Recommendation #1: Aggressively position Edmonton as a global leader on smarter urban traffic safety
The City of Edmonton, in collaboration with industry and academia world leaders in unique traffic safety/transportation, is working on the following strategies:
- A proposal for an IBM First of a Kind (FOAK) research project focused on the development of a unique data integration system which would pull data sets (such as weather, road closures and maintenance, automated enforcement, etc) from multiple City-data centres and convert it into real-time data output to improve traffic safety
- Partnering with Siemens on a Transportation Infrastructure research project
- Working with PTV America, a transportation monitoring group
- Creation of an Institute of Transportation at the University of Alberta
- Development of a global virtual conference and think tank to complement the International Conference on Urban Traffic Safety already hosted by Edmonton each Spring
- Incorporation of twelve key strategies for building global-level networks and relationships into the OTS’s 2011 - 2015 strategic plan.
Recommendation #2: Strengthen governance and accountability for the Office of Traffic Safety (OTS)
The role of the Transportation Data Advisory Committee (consisting of members from the OTS, EPS, EPC and EPSB) is being revised which will strengthen the OTS Governance structure by improving its cross-branch membership
Recommendation #3: Simplify performance measurement of the City’s strategic plans for transportation
The OTS is aligning resource allocation with corporate performance measures to ensure each initiative has clear, established links to the The Way We Move master plan and the City’s larger strategic plan.
Recommendation #4: Further support the open government and open data approach for traffic safety and transportation
An Edmonton Open Gov policy directive is to be peer reviewed by City stakeholders and presented to Council in late 2011. Road maps for City data dissemination will continue to improve as the existing open data catalogue expands.
Recommendation #5: Create an Analytics Centre of Excellence to support a Road Safety data governance model, and analytics leadership across the organization
The OTS will be used as a pilot to build an integrated data framework and governance model which can later be adopted by other City departments.
Recommendation #6: Empower citizens with timely traffic safety and transportation information via social media to instigate two-way citizen communication
Basic collision information is already being tweeted by the OTS and the City is looking at ways the information generated from the data analytics centre could be used to provide citizens with a real-time mash-up of data affecting traffic (such as collisions, weather, road construction, etc) via the City website, social media and 311.
For More Information
Ian Merpaw
| ian.merpaw@edmonton.ca |
