What are the toughest challenges facing the traffic industry? Council Associate Partner Siemens has identified five that it thinks could be solved with some innovative thinking. Toward that end, it is inviting the general public and university students to participate in its Mobility IDEA (Improving Design and Engineering for All) Contest. Winners will be invited to participate in a product prototyping workshop with Siemens technology experts. The company will also reward the top three universities by number of submissions with a traffic control software grant worth $150,000 to help train future traffic engineers.
So what are the five transportation scenarios contest participants are invited to tackle?
- Connected everything: How can you leverage the growth of “connected” technologies to improve the transportation experience?
- Disaster response and resilience: How can advanced traffic management help mitigate the impact of a disaster or extreme weather event?
- Green mobility: What traffic technologies can best improve your city’s CO2 footprint?
- Downtown growth: How can intelligent traffic technologies manage the growing population in downtown areas?
- Parking nightmare: With an average of 30 percent of downtown traffic attributed to people looking for parking, what technologies can increase parking availability and get users off of the road quickly?
“According to recent statistics compiled by Nationwide Insurance, the average urban commuter is stuck in traffic an estimated 34 hours every year and we waste 1.9 billion gallons of fuel. The only way we’ll see a significant reduction in congestion and fuel consumption is to develop technologies that make our traffic systems more efficient,” said Ben Collar, head of U.S. Research & Development for Siemens Road and City Mobility.
"Innovation is Siemens lifeblood," Collar adds, "but we also understand that sometimes the best ideas don’t always happen inside our own walls. Technology is best cultivated when we can gather ideas from the bright minds of today and encourage the brilliant engineers of tomorrow to help improve our traffic systems with intelligent software.”
How to enter
Participants can submit their ideas on the contest website, which details the process and deadlines.
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