Integrated Corridor Management and the Smart Cities Revolution: Leveraging Synergies

Conclusions

Integrated corridor management (ICM) is a practical and logical evolutionary step in transportation operations. As congestion continues to grow and agencies' ability to expand the roadway network is limited by both space and resources, ICM provides operators with a tool to maximize the person-throughput of existing roadway infrastructure through active management of all assets along a corridor. It is this "active management" aspect that offers lessons to smart cities deployments.

Successful ICM deployments in Dallas and San Diego have shown that, in order to achieve the level of real-time, or even pro-active, transportation systems management necessary to optimize corridor operations and maximize the benefits of ICM, there is a need for both a shared vision and a shared view of the corridor between all stakeholders. The institutional issues addressed by ICM stakeholders are the same as those that smart cities planners will have to address.

The lessons learned by ICM deployment teams may be readily shared with smart cities implementers. For example, where there are shared goals between agencies, there are opportunities for shared benefits. Common goals for both ICM and smart cities implementations include safe, reliable, efficient transportation; greater efficiencies for the delivery of city services; and improved quality of life, including both economic vitality and a cleaner environment.

There are many opportunities for operational integration between ICM and smart cities operators. Smart cities initiatives can adopt or mimic ICM initiatives, such as coordinated traffic management and incident response. City-wide, smart traffic management systems can leverage the ICM experience, enabling better special event traffic management and proactive response to severe weather and natural disasters. This capability provides better system reliability and resilience, both of which are common goals for ICM and smart cities initiatives.

ICM deployments have been able to leverage existing and emerging technologies to meet project goals and objectives. This experience provides multiple examples and opportunities for smart cities initiative. Open data standards, big data, and data analytics technologies offer solutions to many technical challenges. ICM initiatives have been able to use these approaches to integrate and fuse real-time data from multiple sources, and disseminate information for use by multiple applications, including decision support systems and traveler information apps. Both ICM and smart cities initiatives benefit from a common platform that enables sharing data securely and ubiquitously across multiple city agencies to support more efficient operations.