How to make smart city projects stick

Working towards a zero-carbon world is an imperative — and something all reasonable human beings can join together to do. Correct?
 

In fact, instituting the sort of smart-city solutions that curb carbon emissions can face roadblocks. Sometimes efforts bog down in collaboration between different stakeholders, who might have their own agendas and ways of doing things.

Then too, sincere political considerations will often drive decision-making, no matter the scientific consensus. A mayor's rejection of a green initiative in response to pressure from constituents who fear it might affect their economic interests can be frustrating, but it's also how representative democracy works.
 

Then there's the fact that a green initiative's timeline can stretch well into the future — longer than the incumbency of most elected officials, who are incentivized to think for the short term.
 

And so on. So how do you make sure that smart city initiatives actually happen, and continue to be supported once they are under way? Given the intricate web of interests that come into play in any big public-facing initiative, there may be no single way. What follows are peeks at three projects that did successfully take root, how the smart city champions in each went about making them happen, and why similar projects elsewhere achieved less favorable results.

The program offered both environmental benefits and material payoffs to Londoners — the latter in the form of promised improvements to the city's public transport system. Those improvements actually materialized, too: on the program's first day, in a sign of the city's competence and good faith, 300 new buses hit the streets to handle the new influx of non-drivers. The program is “largely accepted by public opinion," according to the Centre for Public Impact, and London's municipal government plans to expand green/smart city initiatives.

By contrast: New York City's brand-new congestion pricing program is encountering considerable resistance. Part of the problem could have to do with how both state and local politicians have sold the plan: as a way to generate money to repair the city's dysfunctional subway system. That's made it seem as if drivers into Manhattan are being punished for the sins of the corrupt and ineffective New York political establishment that let the subways deteriorate in the first place. In such matters, trust counts.
 

New York metro-area politicians are falling over themselves to carve out exemptions to the plan for their constituents, and polling indicates that New Yorkers would prefer a “millionaires' tax" to pay for much-needed improvements to public transport.

By contrast: Recognition, a recent project to deploy face-recognition technology in Orlando, has sparked backlash from civil libertarians, city residents, and even employees of Amazon, the Florida city's tech partner. So loud were objections that the project was scrapped for a while (although as of the end of 2018 it's on again).

Far from cultivating citizen buy-in, the Orlando project imposes futuristic technology from the top down: facial recognition tech, after all, is a far cry from the Detroit-style video cameras that are common in convenience stores and elsewhere. The fact that the Orlando initiative features Amazon, an out-of-town monolith that's one of the highest-profile targets of today's anti-tech backlash, doesn't help either.