Fleets of self-driving cars don’t pilot Memphis streets, but it’s time we started to think about the day they will.
Prepare the streets. Prepare the technology. Prepare local policies. John Zeanah, director of the Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development, said the advent of connected and autonomous vehicles in Memphis is still far out on the time horizon. But the potential is here and there’s already opportunity for pilot projects, so Memphis should be ready.
Self-driving cars may be a cool vision for the near future. But for Zeanah, “government efficiency is really cool,” and the time to plan for technology’s role in our near future is now.
For some things, the future is already here. Fiber lines connect and coordinate about half the city’s traffic signals. Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) riders can access free wifi on the bus. In-pipe sensors tell Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (MLGW) if a drain is clogged with fat, oil, and grease.
Though, when Zeanah and his team looked around Memphis, they found technology integration across the city system was uneven, ad hoc — usually driven by individual departments solving a single issue and not by high-level policy. More fiber lines were needed. Broadband subscription rates were lower in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
When Zeanah and his team were about a year away from finishing the Memphis 3.0 Plan, the underlying document for much of the city’s current development, they were also asked to begin research on a “smart city” plan. The culmination of that work is the multi-pronged, multi-year Smart Memphis Plan. Approved in April, the plan will touch nearly every department at Memphis City Hall and services across the city.
“You’ve observed the same thing that we have that’s happening nationwide and worldwide,” Zeanah said. “Technology is changing a lot of the ways in which companies do business, governments provide services, and now how the built environment is being shaped.”
Smart City Overview
Years ago, new technology brought a wave of new products to the market, and homeowners were scrambling to Google “internet of things” to see what the fuss was all about. Early adopters came home in the early 2000s with products somehow connected to their internet that they somehow commanded with their phones.
The Nest Thermostat, though, was the earliest, smart-home introduction for most in 2010. Apple’s HomeKit smart-home hub launched in 2014, the same year Amazon’s Echo (with Alexa) was introduced. These brought smart-home solutions to the masses. Now, homeowners are comfortable controlling tens of thousands of devices with their phones, with their voices, or with automation.
Homeowners use the products to run a better household, helping to control systems like security, lighting, and energy use. Cities use smart technology to run better city services, helping to control systems, like transportation, healthcare, wastewater, education, and law enforcement.
Before you think this is some tech trend, consider that Forbes Business Insights projects the global smart-home industry is expected to grow by 29 percent through 2026, with an estimated value of $622.5 billion that year. The smart-city tech industry is expected to grow by about 20 percent each year, according to a review by Research and Markets, for a total worth of $2.51 trillion in 2025.
Certainly don’t think Memphis is alone in reaching for “smart city” advances. In fact, it would be hard to find a city not working to squeeze government efficiency from technology. The “smart city” movement is big enough, for example, to support the nonprofit Smart Cities Council, with hundreds of member cities worldwide, and Cities Today, a magazine devoted to urban tech innovation.
Smart City Profile: Chattanooga
EPB, Chattanooga’s power and telecom company, installed 1-gig, high-speed internet in 2010, the first city to do so in the United States. It doubled down in 2015, offering community-wide 10-gig service.
For it, PCMag called the city a “tech hub.” Vice magazine said Chattanooga was “the city that was saved by the internet.” The online Techdirt said the city was the No. 1 remote-working town in America. Maybe more importantly, independent research from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga found the fiber network’s 10-year return on investment was $2.69 billion.
In Chattanooga, the “world’s fastest internet” can be yours for $68 per month.
“No Dinosaurs”
The Smart Memphis Plan looks ahead only three to five years. That’s on purpose, Zeanah said. His team started with a blank slate and a short-range plan would really outline the immediate steps needed in the next few years, instead of trying to predict the future.
Tech usage in city division here is gauged on a maturity index that asks: How far along are city departments in their use of technology? On a scale from 1 (using tech in an ad hoc, stand-alone way) to 5 (using tech for shared solutions across divisions), very few Memphis city services make it to the third level. Most hover around 1 or 2 on the scale. Some are at 0 (not working to advance tech).
But this wasn’t a surprise to Zeanah, and he said that “it’s not uncommon for most cities.” So, the starting point for the Smart Memphis Plan was for services that were just beginning to use technology or not using technology at all.
“‘No dinosaurs’ was a mantra we used to try to train our thinking as we were moving through our recommendations not only for our team but for other divisions as well,” Zeanah said. “That was always a good touchpoint to keep coming back to … as we’re moving beyond some of the systems and processes of the past and embracing smart technology in a more integrated way.”
Smart City Profile: Birmingham, Alabama
The city won a Smart Cities Readiness Grant from the Smart Cities Council in 2018 to push a host of improvements.
City leaders want to create an open data portal for citizens, a real-time bus tracker for public transportation, a gunshot detection system for public safety, online energy payments, LED upgrades for streetlights, and a collection of bike-share data to prioritize future bike-lane projects.
MATA
Board a MATA bus today and your phone will find a relief for any modern commuter, a wifi signal.
MATA buses recently got massive tech upgrades: onboard vehicle health monitoring systems, camera security systems, and a next-generation fare system that is slated to come online next year. This all required cellular phone service data for buses.
But the systems didn’t need all of the data, so MATA took the unused portion and made it available to customers as on-board wifi, said MATA President and CEO Gary Rosenfeld.
He and his team found a huge surprise when the wifi system went live. Nearly 500,000 wifi requests came from customers in the first 30 days. In June, the system was hitting about 500,000 wifi requests per day, Rosenfeld said.
The next tech step for MATA was the GO901 Mobile app. On the app, users can already buy tickets, manage their accounts, see where their bus is on a map, find schedules, plan trips, and subscribe to system alerts via text, voice, or email. But Rosenfeld says the next version of the app will have on-time data for customers, and it could transform much about the way we now think about transit tickets.
Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies and diamonds: Those are but two things Hong Kong subway riders can buy with their transit passes, Rosenfeld said. It could work the same way in Memphis, he said, as long as any company out there was willing to think outside the box. He envisioned, maybe, buying Graceland tickets or Memphis Zoo tickets through the GO901 Mobile app.
Such a system could also benefit those with little money. The app could be connected to social service providers in Memphis, just the same as businesses. Partnerships with nonprofits, schools, churches, and more could find pools of funds to pay for bus fares for those who can’t afford it and add it straight to their transit ticket account.
Rosenfeld said there’s even a more direct way the new tech system will help MATA’s poorest users: fare capping.
“About 80 percent of our passengers today buy their bus fare on a daily basis,” he said. “They don’t take advantage of [cheaper] monthly passes in many cases because they can’t afford that much cash at the beginning of the month.”
With the new fare system, MATA will be able to track a customer’s use of the system. Once they use the system a certain number of times in a month, MATA will stop charging them.
MATA data also turned up the need for a new kind of transportation system Downtown, in the Medical District, and in New Chicago. Groove On-Demand allows users in those zones to call for a ride on an app, just like Uber or Lyft. It was eyed as a tool to provide affordable, efficient, and convenient public transit in an area brimming with growth in the pipeline and to help those there get to work, to stores and restaurants, and to medical appointments.
The service was launched in February in a collaboration with the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) and the Memphis Medical District Collaborative. Given COVID-19 restrictions still in place at the time and a still-small Downtown population, Rosenfeld said the service has carried “a couple thousand passengers” and is still “somewhat limited service.” However, he said to expect to see some additional Groove On-Demand services added this month.
MATA’s technological leaps and service opportunities for customers would not be possible, Rosenfeld said, without data.
“You can’t really manage anything you don’t track,” he said. “So the first step is setting up an accountability system you can track and [to be able to] respond and react to changes in trends or for directions.”
Smart City Profile: Long Beach, California
A “smart” Long Beach does not mean flying cars and a monorail down Ocean Boulevard, according to the city’s website. It does, however, mean using data and technology to solve community problems and taking a citizens-first approach to it.
Many Long Beachers had never heard of a “smart city” when leaders there began researching its 2019 smart plan, according to a story in Cities Today. Many worried about data privacy. Some could see benefits to a smart city; others could not. So, those leaders flipped the conversation, citizens — not tech companies — would dictate the city’s “smart” vision.
The city is now using tech to monitor air quality, moving police reports from paper to digital, gathering resident feedback on policy decisions, and giving them a digital dashboard to track development projects.
Memphis Fire Services
Memphis firefighters are sometimes called to help women giving birth. Seasoned firefighters knew these OB-GYN calls came from certain areas of town. But that was institutional knowledge, not data points — that is, until numbers were crunched and plotted on a map.
“The community risk assessment enabled the command staff to visualize all of this information and make decisions,” said Andrew Cole, a senior data analyst with Memphis Fire Services (MFS).
With this new tool, MFS leaders could easily spot the need in the community. They could then ensure areas that needed extra OB-GYN care were staffed with personnel with the right kind of training.
Decision-making tools like this got a boost recently, Cole said. Leaders can now see MFS’s equipment fleet spread across the city in real time. How many trucks responded to one incident? Is that too many? Should we shuffle some equipment around?
Thanks to new tech from a third-party vendor, fire leaders have up-to-date situational awareness on their phones, tablet, or laptop.
“[Firefighting equipment] is a finite resource,” Cole said, “so they’re able to see that we’ve got this much availability and these resources are at the ready or these resources are currently committed.”
Dashboarding data is a big push for MFS, Cole said, and is used in the agency’s day-to-day operations. Data informs decisions on everything from service calls and training to how well a firefighter employs a piece of gear compared to their counterparts.
Smart City Profile: Columbus, Ohio
Thanks to a $69 million investment of federal, state, and local funds, Columbus concluded its mobility-focused Smart City Challenge in June. The city’s locally produced Pivot app brings together payment for buses, bikes, rail, taxis, and rideshares and offers turn-by-turn navigation throughout central Ohio. You can find and reserve parking in the ParkColumbus app.
A $10 million private grant helped electrify the city’s transportation network with more than 900 EV charging stations, which influenced more than 3,200 residents there to buy electric cars and lower greenhouse gases.
Fiber Challenge
Street design and pedestrian safety measures aided by speed cameras. Increased free public wifi at city buildings, parks, and bus stops. LED street lights. Alternative energy production at wastewater treatment plants. Greener building codes. Predicting blight. Clear policies on use of police body-camera footage. Sensors that alert crews when trash cans are full.
All of these are recommendations in the Smart Memphis Plan. They’re all achievable, according to the plan, but they all have a common challenge, Zeanah said: broadband access.
“It’s going to be necessary for the city to have that fiber backbone to be able to support advancement of many of the recommendations in the Smart Memphis Plan,” he said.
Telecom companies laid miles of fiber here in 2019 in the run-up to Verizon’s 5G service launched here in late 2019. A map in the Smart Memphis Plan shows the city’s existing fiber lines, heavily concentrated Downtown and far fewer across the city.
On the map, it’s easy to see how scanty fiber lines in North and South Memphis correlate to low broadband internet subscription rates there. But the Smart Memphis plan aims to fix this, too.
First priority for fiber expansion will go to neighborhoods with low broadband rates that have community anchors as outlined in the Memphis 3.0 plan, and are close to existing fiber lines — think Uptown or Hollywood. Next will be areas with no close access to fiber, and the final push will focus on neighborhood anchors with regular broadband subscription rates.
Memphis is certainly not alone in the digital divide. Broadband rates are lower across the country for racial minorities with lower incomes and less education and for those in rural areas, according to the latest data from the Pew Research Center, which has tracked Americans’ internet usage since 2000. In Shelby County, 99 percent of the population has access to broadband internet but only 43 percent of the population uses broadband internet speeds, according to the latest data from the Federal Communications Commission and Microsoft.
In many ways, Memphis is just starting its “smart” journey, but the Smart Memphis Plan gives a road map to the future. That future is not sci-fi with flying cars, hoverboards, or self-lacing Nikes. But it’s cool if you think getting development permits online is cool. Zeanah does. If your next encounter with city services (paying a bill, requesting a new recycle bin, or needing emergency help) is made easier, you will, too.