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    NEXT: The Most Sophisticated Map Ever

    We’ve all used Google Traffic for our morning commute. Rather than watching the local news or listening in for the intermittent traffic reports on radio, we can simply consult our mobile devices and get a close to real-time picture of traffic patterns for the rush hour commute. I have been known to alter my morning route when I can see that there are overly heavily slowdowns in traffic.

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    Urban data scientists, geographers and urban planners are envisioning a day when such maps will include not simply real-time traffic, but layers upon layers of urban data that will form the digital part of our transportation infrastructure.

    When we talk of such infrastructure today, we usually mean roads, bridges, railways and other such physical features. The increasing amounts of data generated by the activities of cities will soon be gathered together in a large-scale data network that will alter how we move through cities in the very near future.

    Harvey Miller, Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State, envisions a future where urban transportation is visualized by a kind of “mirror world.” A mirror world was described in theoretical terms two decades ago by David Gelernter. Such a world is a virtual representation of some complex system, like a city, in which one would be able to ascertain the real time status of any feature of that system. Far beyond traffic patterns, the viewer of an urban mirror world could hover above the city and see colors, shapes and other such representation of city-level patterns, then zoom down to the neighborhood level to examine roads, buildings and other features of the urban landscape.

    Such a mirror world would be something like a cross between an incredibly sophisticated map and a virtual reality simulation, made up of layers and layers of historical, economic, infrastructural, and social/cultural data. Those data would interact with each other allowing us to discover insights and hidden patterns in the interaction of that disparate data.

    An urban mirror world would be built from tools we already have at hand today, such as environmental monitoring systems, location-aware technologies, and simulation and virtual reality tools. By 2018, for example, every vehicle in Malaysia will have RFID sensors to, among other things, track traffic in real time. In a mirror world data infrastructure, such sensors would be embedded throughout the system, generating petabytes of data about the activities of citizens as they move through urban space.

    Miller says a mirror world of an urban transportation system would consist of live pictures of the state of the city at any given moment, layers of data down to individual plots, artificial intelligence to aid in the process of making sense of the enormous amount of data being collected and the ability to run simulations on that data: what if? scenarios that would allow one to imagine different options and outcomes of decisions made in the present.

    Something like Miller’s vision of a mirror world has been developed by the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT. ManyCities tracks mobile technology activity in a number of world cities, with an interface as simple as Google Traffic. An urban mirror world would present much, much more than just mobile usage.

    Here is one of Miller’s scenarios.

    Maybe you are a traffic manager, and you notice something strange: there is a local professional sports event, but traffic isn’t streaming away from the stadium as expected. You check at the stadium and see that the game is going into overtime. You search for historical analogs and discover that overtime games during playoffs lead to an unusual amount of traffic on the Elm Street Bridge. Triggered by this query, a software agent informs you that the bridge on-ramp is undergoing unscheduled maintenance due to a water main break two days ago. You alert the local traffic police, as well as hospital emergency rooms, to let them know about the situation. The mirror world also propagates this to the general public, allowing them to change their schedules and trips in response to this event. An agent also sends a message to the local air quality monitoring board, suggesting that the unusual event may lead to an abnormal amount of vehicle emissions, perhaps requiring a voluntary “no-drive” day tomorrow.

    Aside from giving me better data to help out my morning commute, Miller sees the advantages of such an urban data infrastructure to include making better infrastructure decisions. MORPC and other urban planners would have a richer, more complex data set with which to plan the urban infrastructure of the next 50 years. Especially if those urban planners can run complex simulations and scenarios under various conditions they could ask “What impact would the development of a light rail system have on mobility and urban congestion?” or “How might more public transportation impact public health?” The urban mirror world would not be held exclusively by official agencies, but would be an open resource for everyone to use.

    And it would tell me more than simply where traffic is tied up on I-70.

    Columbus already has a GIS portal. Given the technical resources and talent in this city, there is every reason to predict that Columbus will be the first city to develop an urban mirror world.

    David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and an associate professor of history and design at The Ohio State University. 

    The next Columbus Futurists monthly forum will be Thursday January 21 at 6:30 PM at the Panera Bread community room (875 Bethel Rd.)

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    David Staley
    David Staley
    David Staley is president of Columbus Futurists and a professor of history, design and educational studies at The Ohio State University. He is the host of CreativeMornings Columbus.
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