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104 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities Smart Cities 105

5.8 Evaluating the Effects of Investments

Evaluating the effects of investments in smart cities is an important element of
planning and implementation. The ability to conduct before and after studies
to understand the effects of implementations is supported by the availability of
a coherent and comprehensive data source. One of the features of the applica-
tion of intelligent transportation systems within North America and Europe has
been the lack of a consistent framework for evaluation. To counter this deficit,
smart city planning should incorporate a detailed definition of arrangements
for performance evaluation, including the effects of investments.
The definition of the analytics to be used to measure the effects of invest-
ments is also of importance as this enables an assessment of the data required.
In many cases, transportation data is collected on an ad hoc basis with levels of
detail and quality that are unrelated to the intended purpose of the data. The
development of a data collection plan that takes full account of the proposed
use of the data is essential to ensure value for money and to enable a coherent
assessment of the effects of the investment. A central data repository or data
lake would be an essential ingredient to this approach. A data lake is construct-
ed from multiple data sources and features the ability to support multigenre
analytics, a function that addresses the challenge of separating the effects of
different investments.

5.9 Smart City Challenges

There is a range of challenges and opportunities associated with the smart city.
These are discussed in this section along with a summary of practical lessons
learned from the London Congestion Charge project [13]. Note that this is not
intended to be an exhaustive set of challenges, opportunities, or lessons learned,
but can serve as the basis for the development of a checklist for a specific smart
city implementation.

New Partners from Multiple Disciplines

The application of intelligent transportation systems has already shown that
need to manage multidisciplinary groups including transportation profession-
als, automobile manufacturers, electrical engineers, system engineers, and a
range of other disciplines that go beyond the conventional asphalt, concrete,
and steel transportation projects. Within a smart city environment, the number
of participants and the characteristics of these participants cover an even wider
spectrum.
Participants can include staff from the mayor’s office, economic de-
velopment professionals, technology incubation leaders, renewable energy