Making Smart Cities Brilliant

It’s a typical morning in Normal City, USA. The streets are snarled with rush hour traffic and everyone is trying to get to work.

For years, a group has been presenting the city planner’s office with a proposal to reengineer some intersections to reduce the endemic traffic jams. The city says they don’t have enough data to justify the investment and the proposal never gets anywhere.

It’s daylight, so the streetlights are not needed—which is fortunate as many of them have burned out—but there
are still a few on. They must not have gotten the memo to turn off during the day, so they continue slurping down electricity all day.