Archive for the ‘urban planning’ Category
The IBM Pulse 2012 Circus Begins
Greetings from Viva Las Vegas, Nevada.
I arrived here under the cover of darkness yesterday.
Actually, I arrived in the afternoon, but “cover of darkness” sounds so much more dramatic.
It’s been a crazy week on the road, but we’re only halfway through. Now, Pulse 2012 starts.
Pulse is one of my favorite IBM Software events. It was Tivoli that brought me back to my native Texas, and to Austin in particular, in the summer of 2001.
I made a lot of great friends during my time working with the Tivoli brand, and I also got a lot of great work done.
And Tivoli has evolved over the past eleven years. Dramatically.
I need not tell any Tivolian, customer or employee, that.
For my money, it’s evolved all for the better. The focus of the Tivoli business has far expanded well beyond its core systems management focus, which is what it was centered around when I arrived.
Here’s a factoid: I’ve never seen a Cirques du Soleil performance. Until last night, when I took in the “Ka” show here at the MGM Grand.
That might seem like a random transition. But follow me here. A Cirques du Soleil performance is like one big ecosystem that must be managed across its disparate parts.
A former theatre major myself, I watched in fascination at all the systems that were in play during the Cirques’ performance of “Ka.” The massive staging and hydraulic systems. The flying systems that allowed the performers to defy gravity. The house staff that welcomed the audience into the show. The audience itself. The cast. The scores of stagehands in the background.
If you’ve seen a Cirques du Soleil performance, you know of which I speak: It’s a massive and complex linkage of disparate systems coming together to create the wonder that are their shows.
These days, your world is a lot like all those systems. And to be able to understand and manage it all, and extract new value out of the knowledge you have about all those systems…well, that’s where Tivoli comes in.
I’m going to leave it at that, lest you think I’m completely off my rocker. But, I’ve done my homework preparing for Pulse 2012, and between the focus on managing mobile, physical assets and infrastructure, the cloud, and the underlying security, there’s plenty of opportunity for systems linkage and improved understanding of those systems.
So, welcome to Las Vegas for Pulse 2012.
Speaking of systems, be sure and check your bathroom for Bengali tigers. I think it’s just always better to be safe than sorry.
In the meantime, keep an eye here on the Turbo blog and on the Twitter hashtag #ibmpulse. There’s going to be a firehose of information coming at you these next few days!
IBM SmartCamp Finalist Profile: Palmap — Building Virtual Bridges, Online And Off

Palmap's Dr. Ronald Zhang explains to the IBM SmartCamp Global Finals audience how Palmap's point of sale and indoor mapping technology will change the way people live and shop, not only in China but around the globe.
Dr. Ronald Zhang left his home city of Beijing to attend the University of Central Florida, and didn’t go back home for eight years.
When he returned, how found there were new buildings and roads and shopping malls, and he almost didn’t recognize the place, never mind couldn’t find his way around.
After catching the American entrepreneurial bug during his time in the States, along with his PhD, Dr. Zhang concluded that what was missing in the GPS, location-based services market was the inside out view.
Google Streetview and Keyhole had captured the outside in view, but Dr. Zhang explains that people spend 90% of their time indoors — at shopping malls, restaurants, and the like. Where was the data feed for them?
And that’s how Palmap came to be founded, a Shanghai-located company now with offices also in Beijing and Xi’an.
Though American entrepreneurialism may seem to be far removed from the Confucian approach to orderly development in the East, that’s precisely what drew Dr. Zhang to the U.S. “With American entrepreneurs, there are no rules, boundaries, you can just go mad and crazy, and only be limited by your imagination. More and more, that’s what’s happening in China, but here (in the U.S.), there’s a spirit that we want to bring back to China.”
Dr. Zhang went on to explain such people “don’t necessarily make revenue yet” but that “they have services that can change the world and make life better.”
His idea for Palmap started around the time the iPhone was released, and he explained that “the Internet changed everything in China, and those technologies are implemented by people like us. So that’s my dream, to do something with my own mind.”
Zhang’s ultimate vision with Palmap is to bridge the divide between click-n-mortar and brick-n-mortar, or as he explained it, “online to offline.”
Between those two endpoints — and not unlike his transcendence of two very different worlds, the U.S. and China — Dr. Zhang and his team plan on making a lot of people happy…and then, and perhaps only then, will the money follow.
Commuters: IBM Feels Your Pain
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Here I am, the next to my last day in Bangalore, which has some of the worst traffic in the world (at least, in terms of what *I* have seen…a guy from Oracle here assured me it was much worse in Bangkok and Sri Lanka), and suddenly the IBM Commuter Pain Study results get released.
The headline: The daily commute in some of the world’s most economically important international cities is longer and more grueling than before imagined, reflecting the failure of transportation infrastructure to keep pace with economic activity.
This is the first time we’ve done such a study on a global basis (earlier versions looked only at U.S. traffic).
IBM surveyed 8,192 motorists in 20 cities on six continents, the majority of whom say that traffic has gotten worse in the past three years.
The congestion in many of today’s developing cities is a relatively recent phenomenon, having paralleled the rapid economic growth of those cities during the past decade or two.
By contrast, the traffic in places like New York, Los Angeles or London developed gradually over many decades, giving officials more time and resources to address the problem.
For example, the middle class in China is growing rapidly, with the number of new cars registered in Beijing in the first four months of 2010 rising 23.8% to 248,000, according to the Beijing municipal taxation office.
Beijing’s total investments in its subway system are projected to be more than 331.2 billion yuan by 2015 as the city expands the system to more than double its current size, according to Beijing Infrastructure Investment Co., Ltd.
The city plans to invest 80 billion yuan in 2010 in building its transportation infrastructure.
The study did offer a number of bright spots.
Forty-eight percent of drivers surveyed in Beijing reported that traffic has improved in the past three years – the high for the survey – reflecting substantial initiatives to improve the transportation network in that city.
In addition, the commute for drivers in Stockholm, Sweden seems to be, if not pleasant, then largely pain-free. Only 14% of Stockholm drivers surveyed said that roadway traffic negatively affected work or school performance.
Overall, though, the study paints a picture of metropolitan-area commuters in many cities struggling to get to and from work each day.
For example, 57% of all respondents say that roadway traffic has negatively affected their health, but that percentage is 96% in New Delhi and 95% in Beijing.
29% overall say that roadway traffic has negatively affected work or school performance, but that percentage rises to 84% in Beijing, 62% in New Delhi, and 56% in Mexico City.
Moscow was notable for the duration of its traffic jams. Drivers there reported an average delay of two-and-a-half hours when asked to report the length of the worst traffic jam they experienced in the past three years.
A Top 10 List You DON’T Want To Be On
IBM compiled the results of the survey into an Index that ranks the emotional and economic toll of commuting in each city on a scale of one to 100, with 100 being the most onerous.
The Index reveals a tremendous disparity in the pain of the daily commute from city to city. Stockholm had the least painful commute of the cities studied, followed by Melbourne and Houston (which tied) and New York City. Here’s how the cities stack up:
The index is comprised of 10 issues:
- Commuting time
- Time stuck in traffic, agreement that:
- Price of gas is already too high
- Traffic has gotten worse
- Start-stop time is a problem
- Driving causes stress
- Driving causes anger
- Traffic affects work
- Traffic so bad driving stopped
- Decided not to make trip due to traffic.
Drum roll, please (or, with due deference to Bangalorians, a nice long honk of the horn), here are the Top 20 winners (err, losers):
Calgon, Take Me Away: The IBM Commuter Pain Index lists the world’s most onerous cities for traffic.
- Beijing: 99
- Mexico City: 99
- Johannesburg: 97
- Moscow: 84
- New Delhi: 81
- Sao Palo: 75
- Milan: 52
- Buenos Aires: 50
- Madrid: 48
- London: 36
- Paris: 36
- Toronto: 32
- Amsterdam: 25
- Los Angeles: 25
- Berlin: 24
- Montreal: 23
- New York: 19
- Houston: 17
- Melbourne: 17
- Stockholm: 15
"Traditional solutions — building more roads — will not be enough to overcome the growth of traffic in these rapidly developing cities, so multiple solutions need to be deployed simultaneously to avoid a failure of the transportation networks," said Naveen Lamba, IBM’s global industry lead for intelligent transportation.
"New techniques are required that empower transportation officials to better understand and proactively manage the flow of traffic."
IBM Global Commuter Pain Survey: Major Findings
Analysis of the survey results indicated a number of key findings related to how traffic impacts commuters:
- 49% of drivers in the 20 cities think that roadway traffic has gotten worse in the last three years, and 18% think it has gotten a lot worse. Five percent say traffic has improved substantially, with only Beijing (16%) and New Delhi (17%) reaching double digit scores. There are seven trouble spots based on the bottom two box scores (ranking traffic as "somewhat" or "a lot worse"): Johannesburg (80%), Moscow (64%), Toronto (64%), Mexico City (62%), Sao Paulo (61%), Milan (59%) and Buenos Aires (57%).
- 87% of the respondents have been stuck in roadway traffic in the last three years. The average delay is one hour. The "best" cities are Melbourne, Stockholm and Buenos Aires, where 25% or more say they have never been stuck in traffic. On the other end of the spectrum, the average reported delay in Moscow is 2.5 hours, where more than 40% say they have been stuck in traffic for more than three hours.
- 31% of respondents said that during the past three years traffic has been so bad that they turned around and went home. The percentage in Beijing, however, is 69%, the high for the survey; and only 15% in Berlin, representing the low.
- If commuting time could be reduced, 16% of respondents worldwide would choose to work more. In New Delhi, 40% said they would work more, the high for the survey; while 5% in Madrid would work more, representing the low.
The Commuter Pain Survey was conducted by IBM to better understand consumer thinking toward traffic congestion as the issue reaches crisis proportions nationwide and higher levels of auto emissions stir environmental concerns.
These events are impacting communities around the world, where governments, citizens and private sector organizations are looking beyond traditional remedies like additional roads and greater access to public transportation to reverse the negative impacts of increased road congestion.
IBM is actively working in the area of Smarter Transportation using a worldwide team of scientists, industry experts and IT services professionals to research, test and deploy new traffic information management capabilities in cities around the world.
Findings from the Commuter Pain Survey will be used to assess citizen concerns about traffic and commuter issues; expand solutions like automated tolling, real-time traffic prediction, congestion charging, and intelligent route planning; and serve as a basis for pioneering innovative new approaches to traffic mitigation.
As for me, I’m about to head back into the Bangalore traffic fray once more, but this time with some comfort that traffic is a LOT worse in other parts of India and the rest of the world, and with some hope that IBM smarter transportation folks are going to be working on this horrible plight.