In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, Zoe has an interesting discussion with entrepreneur and Smart Mobility advisor, David Pickeral. David shares his varied background from Naval Officer to practicing Law, to working with a variety of public and private organisations in the transit and technology arena. He tells us what sparked his interest in the Smart Mobility space, and how he sees the US embracing the Smart City and Community concepts. Zoe and David then cover the advantages of bottom-up, individualised approaches, and how integration and interoperability between government, industry and academia is key. They finish their chat discussing the emerging trend of public-private collaborations in the realm of Smart Mobility. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Listen here:

What we cover in this episode:

• David’s varied background across a number of industries, and how he fell into this Smart Mobility space
• How the discipline of Smart City or Holistic City Planning has evolved
• What a Smart City is and why it’s so important
• How David sees the US embracing the Smart City concept
• The advantage of bottom-up, individualised approaches to Smart City changes
• Some of the projects David is currently working on
• How cloud-based and robust behind-the-scenes systems can enable integration and interoperability across different disciplines
• Collaboration between the essential triangle of government, industry and academia that is needed for public good, not just for profit
• The emerging trend of public-private partnerships and interoperability in mobility spaces

Quotes:

“It’s kind of hard to do Smart Cities and just focus on one aspect of it because being as it’s about the data, you really need to be able to deal with the city as an entire ecosystem—everything is dependent on each other.”

“It really is a city that uses the technology or resources that it has or that it has access to near term, and builds upon it. There’s never going to be a case in most of the world where you build a Smart City from the ground up…you’re going to add in different layers of technology, different layers of data, different layers of sensors and you get to a point where you improve the situation.”

“Most of the measures to improve transportation, or cities, or other infrastructure, or data access or wifi, were approved by voters; people want to invest in having Smart technology available within their city, not just buy a device and carry it around, but have the ability to get better information, use city services and engage with their city both at the government and the private sector level. I think they’re driving it… the strength of the US is going to be this local or as we say State-level initiative rather than big national initiatives.”

“It’s not about putting more and more sensors and devices out there necessarily, but using the data that is coming in…You don’t want to gather the same data twice.”

“People have learned the hard way that you really can’t do it on your own if you’re just government, and nor can you do it just industry and make money.”

“I think the big trend people aren’t talking about is that operating consumer based mobility services [T&C, micro transit, scooters, bikes] is never going to turn profit because the margins are so low… The money is not going to be in selling things to consumers, it’s going to be in monetising the cost take out to governments.”

Links:

Columbus Ohio US Dept Transportation Smart City Project

Los Angeles Metro has an Office of Extraordinary Innovation

Connect:

Connect with David via LinkedIn

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

Podcast Production by Perk Digital