Featured Photo: LocaleIQ Team from San Francisco at the US Ignite Application Summit
LocaleIQ provides data visualization interfaces for citizens wanting to engaged with realtime city data like parking, and other city services
Community Profile:
Smart Renovation in the Home of Innovation.
San Francisco is a diverse, well-loved, iconic American city. Its culture of innovation makes it a popular and fitting home for groundbreaking companies with unmatched access to investment capital (Uber and Salesforce, to name a few), not to mention the top technology workforce in the world. A robust population, however, can be a mixed blessing; for all of San Francisco’s successes, it faces challenges with traffic congestion, public safety, and significant demands on city services. The search for solutions can’t wait—the city is expected to grow by an additional 25% in population over the next two decades.
Which is why the City Innovate Foundation is honing in on specific goals for addressing the big-picture challenges: improving infrastructure, reducing transportation challenges, fighting crime and ensuring fair law enforcement, improving the delivery of city services, and enabling data-driven decisions by the city government, all while fostering economic growth and entrepreneurship.
If that seems like a tall order, it is; but as the history of the city suggests, no hill is too high for San Franciscans to climb. The progress city leaders have made in applying smart solutions is already significant. San Francisco is consistently ranked among smart cities globally, thanks to projects like SFPark: a large-scale controlled parking pricing experiment to manage the availability of on-street parking, utilizing smart parking meters that change their prices according to location, time of day, and day of the week. Through SFPark, the city is able to keep 20% of spaces vacant on any given block.
With a number of both small and large Internet Service Providers providing gigabit-per-second networks to residential and business subscribers, San Francisco’s opportunity to leverage advanced networking is virtually limitless. Google Fiber (Webpass), Sonic.net, Fastmetrics, Wave, AT&T, and even Comcast offer this top-tier service. And as a Smart Gigabit Community, San Francisco can combine its gung-ho approach to smart city advancement with the community possibilities enabled by the strongest network: a human network. Because in the Bay Area, they have the technology—and they know how to use it.
