City Solutions
Transit Capacity Management
Building on the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA’s) existing measures to keep bus and train service timely, efficient, and safe, City Tech Collaborative, together with the Chicago Transit Authority, Genetec, Intel, and Microsoft, developed new tools to provide real-time insights on bus occupancy across multiple vehicles.
A pilot implementation on CTA’s 79th street bus line allowed CTA to proactively meet route ridership demand, reduce both passenger crowding and wait times, and provide a safe, socially distanced rider experience.
Public Transit Lab: UIC Innovation Center
City Tech's partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago's Innovation Center explored how technology can address urban mobility challenges. The collaborative effort between City Tech, UIC, Bosch, Microsoft, and HERE Technologies helped students across multiple colleges develop mobility solutions and encouraged Chicago residents to prioritize high capacity transit systems as part of their daily journey.
Reducing Peak Transit Demand
City Tech partnered with Mastercard, the Chicago Transit Authority, Syniverse, and ideas42 to design low-cost, efficient, and consumer-friendly text message reminders to alleviate public transit congestion during peak use periods - in this case, during Chicago Cubs games.
Mitigating Freight Delivery Congestion
With the increasing demand for faster, more frequent deliveries, freight congestion continues to cause disruption and delays across industries. City Tech partnered with HERE Technologies, Accenture, UPS, and Microsoft to develop new data tools to create flexibility for last-mile package deliveries, with the potential to reduce traffic congestion.
Curbside Management
City Tech and its partners combined new data on curb demand and economic value with emerging technology and pricing models to enable coordinated, dynamic curbside management.
Design Exploration: Streets of the Future
City Tech Collaborative and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gathered mobility and technology experts in Fall 2019 to explore concepts of future street typologies that reflect emerging mobility trends, technologies, and behaviors. Using Chicago as a case study, the results are prototypical designs that illustrate technology-supported strategies that could be deployed throughout the city while maintaining the integrity, functionality, and expectations of the city’s character.
Parking & Mobility Innovation Lab: Millennium Gateway
Together with founding members Millennium Garages, SP+, and Arrive, City Tech Collaborative launched the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab, a cross-sector consortium to integrate parking more fully into urban transportation systems, develop tech-enabled solutions for smart infrastructure management, and cultivate value-added services and space uses.
Optimizing EV Charging for Facility Operators
Parking facilities play an increasingly important role as EV fueling stations, but operators have limited equipment and little visibility into how EV charging stations are utilized across platforms and providers. Our collaboration with Bosch, Millennium Garages, Smarking, and ChargePoint addressed this challenge.
Improving Indoor Mapping & Wayfinding
You‘ve arrived at your destination, but do you really know where you’re going? Mapping apps have gotten quite good at getting us from address to address, but that’s often only part of the journey. We teamed up with HERE Technologies and Millennium Garages to take ‘last mile’ navigation down to the last meter in complex indoor spaces.
Addressing Urban Heat Islands: Urban Heat Response
City Tech has partnered with Microsoft, Esri, d3i Systems, and the City of Chicago to create a new tool that makes NASA climate and weather data accessible to urban planners.
Explore Your Neighborhood: Chicago Health Atlas
With data from over 30 sources, the Chicago Health Atlas is a community health data resource for residents, community organizations, and public health stakeholders. Users can explore 77 community areas and over 160 health indicators through data sets and street-level resource maps.
Connect Chicago Innovation Program
The Connect Chicago Innovation Program supported collaborative, community-led ideas to increase technology access, digital skills, and adoption across Chicago.
Through the program, award recipients have created an affordable and accessible cybersecurity workforce development program for women and leveraged data to create a neighborhood-level tool to understand gentrification and the displacement of community resources.
Understanding Neighborhood Displacement and Disinvestment
Continued gentrification, displacement, and disinvestment are changing the landscape of our neighborhoods. The Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University and MAPSCorps teamed up to create data indicators, sustainable processes, and tools to help organizations access, analyze, and compare neighborhood-level data to equitably preserve and improve communities.
Cybersecurity Workforce Development
Past award recipients AnitaB.org and ISACA’s SheLeadsTech program partnered to create an affordable and accessible cybersecurity workforce development program to increase the representation of women in technology positions and provide pathways for retention and advancement in the field.
Capacity Management for Shared Urban Spaces
Reopenings following COVID-19 posed unique challenges to complex, shared, urban spaces such as conference centers and entertainment venues.
Using Navy Pier as a testbed, City Tech, NTT, SDI Presence, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Intel, combined high- and low-tech solutions to develop physical and operational design changes and requirements for flexible trip planning tools that improved visitors’ experiences, maintain safety, and increase businesses’ resilience in the face of future disruptions.
Capacity Management
COVID-19 has raised the stakes for managing shared spaces, but the importance – and value – of proactive capacity management predates the coronavirus and is certain to outlive it. Successfully reopening the public realm required technology, design, and policy solutions as well as strong communications and engagement to enable informed, responsible choices.
City Tech and our partners integrated existing assets and advanced technologies to improve short-term capacity management operations while building a foundation for continued innovation.
Remote Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring, maintenance, and incident response are among the most important (and resource-intensive) responsibilities of public sector agencies and private partners. Cutting-edge drone technology, however, can facilitate real-time transit infrastructure monitoring, data collection, and computer-assisted analysis of infrastructure integrity, obstructions, security, and other critical capabilities.
Explore how City Tech and partners developed and deployed drone-based solutions to monitor critical infrastructure.
Streamlining Construction Communication: Utility Connect
Using construction sites as testbeds, City Tech's Utility Connect project demonstrated how real-time communications tools can improve utility service coordination and workflow among construction stakeholders and utility providers.
Preventing Flooding: Smart Green Infrastructure Monitoring
A consortium of hardware, software, and local government experts created and launched a new, low-cost sensor product to measure the performance of stormwater infrastructure and help cities manage urban flooding.
Preventing Utility Damage: Underground Infrastructure Mapping
Inaccurate location information for underground utilities cost cities and utilities time and money through increased costs for engineering and design, frequent accidental damages during construction, threats to public safety, prolonged construction, and construction cost overruns.
City Tech and partners built and tested new data aggregation and collection methods, along with improved workflow methodologies alongside an active four-block construction project in Chicago’s congested River North neighborhood.
Evaluating Economic Impact
City Tech partnered with Mastercard to understand the economic development impact of the Chicago Blues Festival.
The Criminal Justice Pilot of the Chicago Data Collaborative
City Tech convened an innovative coalition of Chicago-area organizations to share data and paint a more complete picture of our criminal justice system.
Chicago School of Data
The Chicago School of Data engaged local nonprofits, start-ups, and technologists to understand data-related challenges and solutions. We recorded and published our results.
