Transportation Modes, Data Converge to Make Mobility Efficient

The convergence of data, AI-enabled systems, and the growing comfort with and deployment of technologies like robotaxis are putting mobility innovation in the fast lane.

“The sheer number of systems and touch points is very different. It’s just a massive amount of information and data, not just from one agency, or one city,” said Jannet Walker-Ford, the advisory and planning business line executive at WSP, an engineering consultancy.

“It’s just very massive, to be able to do all the analytics, and what that means, and then use that for predictability, and that sort of thing. That is the evolution,” Walker-Ford, the former CIO for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, said April 28 during the CoMotion Miami conference.

Today, systems are more integrated across modes, she said, calling attention to the way congestion management or intelligent transportation systems are in sync with logistics and freight movements, or incident response.

Beth Goldsmith, chief strategy officer for Miami-Dade County’s Department of Transportation and Public Works, agreed with this analysis of transportation systems connected via technology.

“We’ve sort of moved from data collection — which is where we started out — and now we’re moving into analytic AI, and predictive AI that actually allow us to do analysis on customer behavior, to shape our routes around it,” Goldsmith said during a panel at CoMotion Miami.

The Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA) in Florida uses predictive analytics for insight into when a bus will break down, before it fails.

“It is advance warning for our maintenance team so that they can then map out what their workload is for the rest of the day, in terms of getting that bus in, doing that repair before it actually fails while it’s in service,” Nathaniel Ford, JTA CEO, said during the panel. The program, he added, has yielded cost savings, and reduced the need to send crews out to a stranded bus.

“Frankly, from a customer service standpoint, that breakdown that offloads passengers, we very rarely, if at all, have those types of catastrophic failures,” he said. “I’m collecting this data. It’s giving me information. Am I using it in the right way to prevent accidents, ensure safety and protect the agency from liability and things of that nature?”

Officials in Los Angeles are using the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympic Games — which the City of Angels will host — as an opportunity to move the needle on transportation innovation.

“It’s a really interesting challenge, where the Games — especially the 2028 Games — offers an opportunity to say, L.A. is not just about cars. We have all these multimodal solutions,” Sam Morrissey, vice president of transportation for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, said at the Curbivore conference in L.A. last month.

Large events like these, said Jarvis Murray, commercial ride-share and mobility administrator at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, provide “a chance to really change how we do things, and something that’s going to be a legacy for our future generations, moving forward.”

The Games, said Morrissey, represent an opportunity to reorient car-focused thinking about L.A. transportation.

“Make it about multimodal solutions, and multimodal choices that suit the needs, the schedules, the demands, whatever you have, of the people that are transporting to these events,” he said. “Because it will be the biggest peacetime gathering in global history, here in Los Angeles. It will be massive.”

It’s not just cities hosting international events that are tapping technology’s potential to serve in improved operations, efficacy and consumer ease. Autonomous vehicles, Ford said, are practically vacuuming up data as they move through cities — which can be put to use across city departments.

“The sheer amount of data that we’re collecting is just far beyond our imaginations, with the numbers of cameras, sensors and things of that nature,” he said. “I think AI is now the catch phrase, but it’s just the developmental arc, as it relates to data collection and technology.”