Main use cases: Data analytics, smart mobility
Population: 911,507 (2019 estimate)
Key players: Jacksonville Transportation Authority CEO Nat Ford; North Florida Transportation Planning Organization Executive Director Jeff Sheffield; Mayor Lenny Curry
What are the city’s main smart city priorities?
The city’s major smart city initiative continues to be the Bay Street Innovation Corridor, “a three-mile business, residential and entertainment segment of Bay Street in the heart of downtown,” as a website for the project describes it.
As the Jacksonville Business Journal reports, the corridor is a project that has many partners and is part of a larger regional smart city vision. It is supported by the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization, Jacksonville Transportation Authority, local utility JEA and Jax Chamber. The Business Journal notes:
The Bay Street corridor would feature 15 autonomous shuttles, a swath of TPO sensors, JEA’s dark fiber for telecommunications and potentially solar panel-lined sidewalks or roadways. It would also serve as a designated lane for businesses to field test and audition their technologies.
In late May, the JTA signed an agreement with the Federal Transit Administration to move ahead on the project, which will integrate “smart corridor technologies, advanced communications and safety features such as connected intersections, smart pedestrian signals and flood sensors,” Mass Transit magazine reports. The project includes autonomous vehicle control systems and 12 to 15 federally compliant autonomous vehicles.
The Bay Street Corridor is seen as the first step to turning North Florida into a “smart region.” Source: North Florida TPO
North Florida TPO Executive Director Jeff Sheffield says the idea behind the corridor is to build up the smart city brand in and around Jacksonville and attract investments, making the area a test bed for new technologies.
Sheffield, who says he does not speak for the city, says the backbone of what his organization has developed is a regional project known as the Smart North Florida Data Exchange, an open-data exchange that is part of a broader “smart community” concept in the region. Jacksonville is just one local government or agency involved in the program, along with JEA, the North Florida TPO, the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce, the JTA and the city of St. Augustine, Fla.
The data exchange is used for all sorts of needs during the pandemic, including delivering hotspots and laptops to students without access to broadband and identifying food deserts where residents lack access to healthy food.
“All of these things are being generated primarily because of this notion of what that data exchange can be,” Sheffield says. “That thing has gone beyond its deliberate value of data sharing to being this sort of brand for the spirit of cooperation and spirit of sharing, and that’s something we never expected.”
Nonprofits, hospitals and other organizations are coming to the data exchange in search of ways to break down data siloes and address challenges, some of which are transportation-related, which the TPO can directly help with, Sheffield says. For other challenges, the Smart North Florida organization can connect residents to innovators and entrepreneurs to help solve problems, he says.
How has the pandemic affected Jacksonville’s smart city plans?
The pandemic has not necessarily accelerated anything related to the Bay Street Corridor project, according to Sheffield, because it involves reconstruction and the addition of new technologies.