How AI can help cities improve mobility planning

So, um, cities vary widely in their data maturity, their resources, and even their capacity institutionally.

From your experience, what are the biggest levers that allow a city to make meaningful ... action once they unlock geospatial sustainability data.

I'll come back to that collaboration piece.

Um, I think we all sort of know that, um, the geospatial analysis itself is just one small step of the many, many steps that it takes to get to a completed project as a, a public sector agency.

Um, there's the funding that you have to get, there's the buy-in that you have to get.

And so I think that as we're thinking about AI, you know, it can be used for things like data cleaning, data analysis, interrogating the data.

It can also be used for things like generating reports and sharing things with your colleagues.

So I really think that those are, um, the things that be- can be unlocked once you get past the step of using AI for geospatial analysis.

Well, and you even mentioned the democratization of it.

I did a case study once on, uh, a, a kind of a massive slum area in Africa outside of Joburg, where essentially most of the population wasn't even counted.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause they didn't, they weren't able to do that bec- and they used geospatial analysis to basically bring those people in, both into the population who are counted so that they could get additional resources.

So there's a lot of really, really interesting applications-

Right

... that can actually help a lot of people who are underserved before, right?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of lessons that even a company like Google can take from that.

I, I was just at a session this morning where they were using AI and computer vision detection of dwellings in, in Africa.

Yes.

And these informal dwellings that pop up.

Right.

Um, they said a quarter of the population was in informal dwellings, and they really had to do a lot of labeling and training of that AI to start recognizing that those are legitimate dwellings.

Um, and I think that that's something that we'll also have to start taking into account as we roll out our geospatial tools and AI tools across the globe, is that the local context is really going to matter.

Um, and so the more feedback that we can get from, and, and probably the public sector here is the critical player.

Right.

What is it that we're not getting right about your city and your area?