Is Your City Known For Its Flow?
By John Ahlman, Vice President, Xerox Global Experiential Marketing
If youâre marketing a major metropolitan area like New York or Los Angeles, what would you want it to be associated with? Youâd want to promote the energy of the nightlife, the haute couture of Fifth Avenue and Beverly Hills, or the excitement of seeing attractions such as the statue of Liberty or the Hollywood sign.
But what if your city conjured up thoughts of really crippling traffic gridlock?
Is there anything worse than being stuck in traffic? Few feelings are more frustrating than those moments in your car when youâre in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you canât find a parking spot or every traffic light you encounter (or so it seems) is red.
And typically, the bigger the city, the bigger the problem. Drivers in the ten most-congested cities in the United States sit around 42 hours in traffic jams every year, wasting more than $121 billion in time and fuel while doing so.1
Thereâs no disputing that jams reduce the quality of life for everyone. And with 85 percent of the developed world predicted to be living in cities by 2050,2 the problem isnât going away.
At Xerox, we love flow. Our solutions are helping cities all over the world re-engineer their transportation systems and traffic flows, and get people and goods where they need to be, quicker and with less hassle. We help authorities around the world deliver policy objectives and meet business goals. And we do it from our research centers to the delivery and execution of data analytics; from electronic tolling system to back-office platforms; and from proof of concept to parking meter operations.
Thereâs nothing our engineers love more than solving a tough congestion problem. Weâve even written an eBook about it.
Read Make it flow: Seven ways cities are fighting congestion and learn how cities all over the world are coming up with ingenious ways to tackle the causes of congestion, clear the clog and re-instate flow.
1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2013/04/25/ the-worlds-most-traffic-congested-cities/ 2 http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/ WUP2014-Highlights.pdf