The gist: Big Blue and mega-consultant firm KPMG outlined a comprehensive smart city action plan for LCG over the past year, developing concepts like digital payments for public services and smart traffic sensors for more efficient traffic control.
Smart cities are what again? It’s a catchall term for the use of innovation to make government more efficient and transparent. More often than not, it’s associated with advances in automation, data and the internet of things (IoT). Concepts can be as cutting edge as AV transit and as boring as fiber-connected traffic counters.
Around 70 initiatives were identified, according to LCG spokeswoman Cydra Wingerter, over the course of the past year. Wingerter shared a sampling of the results, which were discussed in part at a soft reveal during LCG’s PlanLafayette week in October:
- Smart Fire Alarms deployed parishwide and connected via LUS Fiber to improve Lafayette Fire Department response times.
- Digital Payment Network to accept remote credit card payments and platforms like Venmo and PayPal for public services.
- Digital 311 to improve public service requests and provide real time data and collect public feedback.
- Smart Traffic Improvements like predictive analytics, adaptive traffic controls to carve paths for emergency response vehicles and updated sensors for traffic volume. The I-49 Connector got a mention, too.
- Disaster Preparedness Plan includes a companion mobile app for notification and e-learning modules for flood and hurricane prep education. This piggybacks on the city’s Bloomberg Challenge application. Lafayette was a finalist for the challenge but came up short.
I’ve asked for the full list of projects and a copy of the contract with IBM/KPMG, but have received no response from the administration.
Where do Cryptocurrency and Blockchain fit in? You probably aren’t asking this question, but you should. At the Opportunity Machine’s innovation conference in October, Crypteaux architect and Robideaux adviser Joe Castille mentioned that IBM/KPMG validated his public innovation ecosystem concept. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the broad strokes include funding public projects through yields from a cryptocurrency launch — Castille used the I-49 Connector as an example — and establishing an e-residency program to attract blockchain entrepreneurs, an idea that’s worked well in Estonia. Yes, Estonia.
Innovation is a key priority for the Robideaux administration. A Lafayette-based team pitched a freight hyperloop corridor among other transportation concepts at a major conference in Columbus, Ohio, and placed in the competition. Robideaux and mayoral assistant Kate Durio took part.
What to watch for: Whether Robideaux has the political capital after the LUS controversy to get anywhere with his ideas, particularly those that require the council to sign off. Robideaux recognized the challenge in remarks at that conference in Ohio:
So you can have this vision of all these really great things, but when you sit down with your council members and say, “We need to spend money on a smart city initiative,” and let’s just say it’s $1 million. They’re going to come back and say, “How about you spend it digging out that ditch that’s in this neighborhood that’s flooded three times?” That’s the reality that we face.
Joel Robideaux,
via Smart Cities Dive