Driving Through The Data Downpour With Smart Transportation

Smart city transportation is an ever-evolving category with many names. City transportation assets are basically cars, scooters, roads and public transit (trains, buses, etc.). But injecting “smart” into the equation opens the door to a whole host of other possibilities like autonomous vehicles, V2X (vehicle talking to everything), smart parking, multi-modal transit, traffic management, e-hailing and more. And, as more city assets are able to communicate with each other, advanced scenarios are also foreseeable – for example, vehicles or traffic lights alerting city emergency and information services that an accident has occurred or that the air quality in a particular location is at unsafe levels. Getting to this level of smart will require an IT architecture where data can be securely processed at the digital edge with governance models that address data privacy concerns.

Allied Market Research projects the global smart transportation market will reach $238 billion by 2022.Supportive legislation, such as the EU Directive on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), is expected to help Europe retain the largest share of the market, while Asia-Pacific will grow the fastest, reflecting strong smart city growth in that region. In the U.S., legislative support is coming largely from the state level, enabling local testing to move forward. Industry consortiums such as 5GAA, which Equinix is a member of, are also playing a major role in advancing smart transportation solutions because they bring together the different players needed to make them work. Most solutions, like the connected vehicle category below, will depend on collaborative digital ecosystems of participants that can share data and insights with one another.

Data and more data is a common theme

While there are many different use cases for smart transportation, they all share a few common elements to be “smart”:

Here are few examples of how these elements are coming together in real world situations and trials:

Navigating all that data with interconnection

One of the biggest challenges for smart transportation solutions is figuring out how to handle all the data. There are connected vehicles under development now that can generate up to 100 terabytes of data per day. With that volume of data, having compute power at the edge is essential.