Earlier this week, Mayor Ted Wheeler marked the first major milestone for Portland’s Smart City PDX initiative with the launch of the city’s new Traffic Safety Sensor Project. Two hundred CityIQTM intelligent sensor nodes are being installed atop PGE streetlights along three of Portland’s deadliest streets – SE Division, 122nd Avenue and SE Hawthorne Blvd. Traffic engineers with the Portland Bureau of Transportation will use the real-time data about how vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians move to improve street design and support Portland’s Vision Zero traffic safety goals.

What are the implications of a project like this for Portland businesses? Simply put, Portlanders will now have a finger on the pulse of the city. By extracting data sets from these sensors and creating a centralized data management system, the opportunities to inform business decisions are massive.

At the very core of the project is a unique public/private sector collaboration. GE’s Current business manufactures the CityIQ nodes, which are powered by Intel® IoT technology and linked to a cloud-based platform via AT&T data connectivity. Safety is the city’s chief priority for obvious reasons and a natural place for the project to begin, but the potential of smarter street lighting could one day extend beyond its initial application. The CityIQ infrastructure being installed in Portland is built on a secure open platform so the same sensors that will initially be used to collect traffic safety-related data will also create a digital infrastructure with tremendous potential for business growth and civic engagement.

Portland’s export-driven economy could realize benefits from expedited freight movement and retail businesses can assess curb economic factors. But perhaps the most important component of the Rose City’s newest initiative is the art of the possible. The Portland business community is well positioned to leverage technology to achieve tangible short-term goals while paving the way for future innovation.

To understand how an IoT-enabled street lighting infrastructure could create a new model for civic engagement, just look at the smart phone that’s probably within your reach right now. A decade ago, a phone was still primarily a device used to make voice calls. Today it’s an essential digital tool that influences almost every aspect of our daily lives. The platform evolved as new applications unlocked its potential to serve unmet needs. Who would have imagined a time when your smart phone would be used to summon a fellow Portlander with a car to take you somewhere on demand and pay with your phone?

Imagine if we had similarly rich data about the way a city operates that could be used to crowdsource great app ideas from academics, entrepreneurs and researchers across Portland’s booming tech community. Put simply, bigger data is better business. As more data streams become available from the sensors, more opportunities arise for the community to build new business models through application development and municipal partnerships. Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability is working with us to explore possibilities beyond traffic safety.

For technology companies like AT&T, Current by GE and Intel, the same paradigm powers the mission to customize each city’s platform based on its own needs and unique set of challenges. As more municipalities continue adopting smart city IoT technology, product design and analysis capabilities will continue to improve, and lessons learned in one city may help spur additional development in others.

Innovation on such a large and ambitious scale is never easy, and amazing outcomes do not happen overnight. But cities like Portland are showing the rest of the country a model for how public and private partners can come together to solve real-world challenges and open doors to new businesses, jobs and innovation. Mayor Wheeler said his commitment is to ensure technology, data and partnerships with the private sector are used in a coordinated way to improve people's lives. And if the consumer technology world has taught us anything, it’s that we should never underestimate the art of the possible.