The City of Coral Gables and the University of Miami recently partnered in organizing and launching the “Design Your Coral Gables” Smart City Solutions Competition, which invited participants to bring their ideas to life by designing and prototyping technology solutions on one of five transportation and traffic challenges.
After a launching event in January at the University of Miami Smart City Conference, and two subsequent checkpoints in February and March, the City of Coral Gables and UM conducted the final presentations at the recent eMerge America.
Team “The Laboratory of Everyday Things” took first place; Team “SmartDay Coral Gables” finished in second place, and Team “Kayros” was third place. A special mention was given to Team “Ponciana II” for its solution idea.
The winning team, “The Laboratory of Everyday Things,” presented “N.O.T.,” a Smart Neighborhood Oriented Transit system and user interface app for Coral Gables. This winning solution provides information in real time and live feed of the schedule, service, location and routing of existing city-neighborhood scale passenger transportation systems and their connection with intercounty and intercity transit.
Team “Smart Day Coral Gables” presented its Smart Day Coral Gables service that polls data from smartphones, interfacing directly with commonly used apps. The system draws location data with high accuracy to build a database of activity, and to form statistical distributions of movement patterns and clustering. This data will provide the city with another layer of information it can use in planning and projection.
Team “Kayros,” proposed Uziel charging stations, which provide fast chargers for a variety of electric vehicles providing energy for a range of 60 to 80 miles in a fast 20-30 minutes charging time. The stations are pre-fabricated, modular, grid and are powered by solar roofs that can supplement charging costs during peak hours.
Team “Poinciana II” presented the idea of requesting data through Google’s traffic monitoring system which uses the location data of android users on the road to estimate congestion. The city intends to set up a process to use that data to request Miami-Dade County alter traffic light timings at certain intersections to relieve traffic congestion.
During a recent city commission meeting, the City of Coral Gables congratulated all participating teams for developing and presenting their ideas to address challenges in traffic, safety and transportation. The city also expressed thanks to all the judges, and its partners at University of Miami School of Architecture as well as Dean Rodolphe El-Khoury and the Center for Computational Science and Dr. Nick Tsinoremas for collaborating in the experience.
