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VTA's Innovation Center: 'Silicon Valley' for Transit
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) recently opened an Innovation Center at its River Oaks headquarters as a space where VTA teams, companies, startups and students can develop, test and showcase new transportation technologies from trip planning to connected cars and security.
The VTA headquarters building is located within the North San Jose Transportation Innovation Zone, an area set up by the city of San Jose as a "living lab" for infrastructure demonstration. VTA used existing funds to make renovations to the building, which included the creation of the Innovation Center.
"The Innovation Center will bring Silicon Valley to the Valley Transportation Authority," said VTA General Manager and Chief Executive Officer Nuria Fernandez. "It's an incubator of new ideas and a developer of existing ideas that have not been applied to transit."
VTA will use the center to improve the customer experience, offer better transportation choices and optimize its vehicles, roadways and other mobility infrastructure.
"Ideas are fantastic, but what really counts are solutions. VTA is about solutions," said Doug Davenport, executive director of Prospect Silicon Valley, which administers the innovation zone. "We're trying to get something done. We partner with doers."
To understand what types of technology could help make transit more appealing, "we need to put ourselves in the positions of customers," said VTA Board of Directors member and San Jose Vice Mayor Rose Herrera. She also cited the North San Jose Transportation Innovation Zone as a good example of her city and VTA collaborating for innovation.
As economic and population growth puts more and more pressure on limited infrastructure, "we need to figure out how we're going to maximize the use of our transportation network," Fernandez said. She noted the importance of "the Internet of Things," a term that refers to the increasing wireless connectivity among everyday objects such as vehicles, refrigerators and watches, in this process.
Current technology projects at the center include a zero-emission vehicle with dynamic, on-demand routing that connects with smartphone requests, expanding VTA's current TransLoc real-time light rail arrival app to the bus fleet and an open-source, multimodal trip planner for any combination of public transit, walking, biking, park-and-ride, bikesharing and driving if necessary.
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Visitors at an open house tour the VTA Innovation Center. In the foreground is a creative train exhibit brought by Cisco to demonstrate what the company calls "the Internet of Everything" as applied to a European train system. It enables increased awareness of real-time seating capacity and other information that can help customers plan their trip or improve operations. |
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