Connected commuting in San Jose - Once again, innovations arise in California

Thanks to Robin Chase ... According to PR Newswire, 

"This week, the New Cities Foundation (http://www.newcitiesfoundation.org) launched a Task Force on connected commuting at City Hall in San Jose, California. The initiative will look at ways to improve the overall commuting experience by making it more efficient, engaging and fun, using social media platforms. The project is a collaborative effort between the City, several leading companies in this field and first rate academic partners. NCF believes transportation and mobility issues are among the most important challenges facing cities worldwide and this is an area where IT-based innovations can make a radical change.

Task Force membersinclude NCF Founding Member Ericsson, San Jose's Department of Transportation, the University of Berkeley, MIT, Orange Telecom and two start-up mobile phone app companies, Waze and Roadify."

Project aims to use social network of comuters and IT innovations to understand real mobility behaviors, information exchanged and shared in real time. Then based on these new data, "the Task Force hopes to spur innovative products, technologies, and services that enhance commuting."

According to Mathieu Lefevre, Executive Director of NCF, "We are excited to be here in San Jose to launch this great project. Commuting and mobility are among the most important issues facing cities here in California and across the globe. We believe this initiative will encourage collaborative thinking among the private, public and academic sectors and generate ideas that will apply whether you are in San Jose, Singapore or Sao Paolo."

"The massive population growth of future cities is a great challenge," said Patrik Cerwall, Director of Strategic Marketing, Ericsson. "Commuting is just one issue, but an important one. As a part of this task force, we are excited to look more deeply into the application of social and mobile as a way of improving the lives of city commuters."

Gotoo (in France) Waze and Roadify use same ideas: crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, new currencies to reward cityzen to share a data. Here data and currencies are :

1. parking place, time and streetcarma
2. bus real time location, time and streetcarma
3. congestion, time

In Europe also, we have all individual bricks to build this kind of demonstration. Who will be able to reward properly the cityzen who share a strategic data ? Free currencies can be the missing link ...