Overview
Integrated Corridor Management and the Smart Cities Revolution: Leveraging Synergies
Previously published ICM primers, including on traffic incident management (TIM) and transit operations, described how specific modal programs or activities could be integrated into ICM to provide additional operations and performance benefits to the ICM corridor. But because smart cities and ICM are so fundamentally similar in terms of their requirements and objectives, this primer will focus more on the opportunities for co-deployment synergies and how approaches and lessons learned from one can be translated to the other. For example, a community lacking a smart cities program but interested in developing one could start by implementing ICM on a particular corridor. The institutional relationships, operational processes, and technical methods developed as part of the successful ICM deployment could then be extended across different regions and across different public service areas as part of a broader smart cities program.
In many ways, a typical ICM corridor can be viewed as a "mini-city," albeit only in the transportation realm, with its mix of transportation-specific users, operators, and stakeholders, each with varying needs and objectives, and a unified need for cross-modal and cross-jurisdictional coordination in order to deliver the transportation services required by its users. Both ICM and the smart cities philosophies share the same challenges inherent in coordinating among various stakeholders. This primer examines the opportunities and challenges (institutional, technical, and operational) associated with integrating smart cities stakeholder groups and operations areas with ICM.
This primer also identifies many of the synergies (i.e., two-way benefits) of an integrated approach to ICM and smart cities. Such synergies include the exchange of information on planned and unplanned events (city wide vs. corridor-specific); coordinated response to events and incidents; better, data-driven decision making; and a broader measurement of system performance.
The concept of "smart cities" is a relatively recent one, dating to the early 2000s as a response to growing urbanism and the return of population and commerce to cities. Its growth as a concept is due in no small part to technological advances that began replacing old style information "stove piping" with data sharing and improved communication. This in turn drove increased demand for more-accountable public services from cities that formerly had deteriorating infrastructure, inefficient systems, and limited public agency resources.
As a concept, smart cities is perhaps only slightly older than integrated corridor management (ICM), which is defined as a practical application of a smart cities objective, albeit within the defined cordon of a corridor, not necessarily city wide.
In 2014, as a means to position the emerging connected vehicle community of strategies into the concurrently emerging smart cities movement, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Joint Program Office (JPO) defined a smart (or "connected") city as "a system of interconnected systems, including employment, health care, retail/entertainment, public services, residences, energy distribution, and not least, transportation. This 'system of systems' is tied together by information and communications technologies (ICT) that transmit and process data about all sorts of activities within the city."
In many ways smart cities are still lagging in terms of technological maturity, primarily because smart cities initiatives must overcome decades of public service "culture" and overhaul a much wider breadth of services than ICM initiatives.