Smart City Ambitions in the ‘City That Lights and Hauls the World’
Schenectady, New York, is proving you don’t need to be a major tech hub to make smart city investments.
Schenectady, New York, located northwest of Albany, doesn’t necessarily have a high profile as a smart city. But it does have the heritage as a city with industries that have long powered innovation.
“The City That Lights and Hauls the World,” as Schenectady has been called, is the cradle of General Electric and the American Locomotive Company and in 1950 had a population of around 90,000 residents. These days, Schenectady has 65,305 residents and has worked to reposition its economy around renewable energy.
While GE has long since relocated its headquarters, the company remains an important part of Schenectady’s economic fabric. Smart city infrastructure is becoming an integral part of that fabric, too.
“I believe the full potential is to have citywide deployment of an LED lighting network, where supporting technology goes into the lightheads like Wi-Fi, cellular, video or environmental sensor-based analytics,” Mayor Gary McCarthy told Route Fifty in an interview. “We really have the potential for transformational change in communities and regions.”
Already Schenectady has seen small-scale deployments by Cisco Systems on lower Union Street and of GE’s own product several blocks over, coupled with a public education campaign informing property owners, businesses and residents of a communication mesh network’s potential.
McCarthy views the two pilots as complementary “while looking to see what would best serve the needs of Schenectady.”
“I think it’s very important so that we get business models that are replicable in communities,” he said.
Initial estimates show a cost savings of $370,000 due to reduced energy usage where the LED lighting has gone in, though they’ve only been in for about 30 days, and a few more month’s worth of empirical data is needed for analysis. That’s also true of their traffic monitoring functionality. The longer life of LEDs should also cut down on maintenance costs.
McCarthy wants to equip the lights with emerging tech like cameras monitoring traffic flow, managing parking resources and synchronizing traffic lights better than the sensors embedded in roads today. There will ideally be a public safety element as well, where the network can leverage police resources.
High-definition footage of street surfaces can inform Schenectady’s pavement management program to ensure drivability, and motion monitoring can help illuminate heavily populated areas while dimming lighting of vacant ones for greater energy savings. Residents’ porch lights might even be connected to the system.
An appointed Smart City Advisory Commission oversees the city’s limited deployments and will eventually make final decisions on which technologies to move forward with.
“We anticipate further modifications as we learn more, as we do more,” McCarthy said.
All will employ more sophisticated engineering, he said, but some will be truly disruptive.
To complement the effort, Schenectady is assembling a public-private partnership that includes Schenectady County, the Municipal Housing Authority, the City School District, local hospitals and the business community to ensure the accessibility, marketing and proper management of the new smart infrastructure.
The important thing, in McCarthy’s mind, is not missing any opportunities to deploy additional applications during installment.
“It’s an exciting time, and it’s just great to be part of this,” he said. “We have a number of partners working with us to put in place the best, most optimal configuration.”
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