As part of our innovation program we launched the Clearways Innovation Challenge on September 24. We are encouraging developers, entrepreneurs and designers to come up with an innovative solution to help keep clearways clear. Clearways play an important role in reducing congestion and improving traffic flow and traffic management. To ensure that they are kept clear and managed effectively we are challenging you to help us create an innovative solution to tackle the problem.
Why Clearways?
Managing clearways is a problem that affects the general public on a daily basis. A stranded or illegally parked car in a clearway can have a flow on effect; increasing traffic and congestion. We have identified that managing clearways and keeping them clear is a good problem to solve using data and technology. As it stand today, most of the processes involved are manual and not optimised for efficiency. The Transport Management Centre (TMC) monitors the NSW road network. Although it has access to thousands of cameras across the network, it still relies on the public or police to report cars that are illegally parked. There may be other problems that could be solved through the use of smart use of technology, for example letting customers know where their car has been towed to or notifying people when a clearway is about to become active.
About the Challenge
The Clearways Innovation Challenge opened on September 24 and entries will close on October 14 at 11:59pm. We are looking for an innovative solution to help us keep clearways clear through the use of technology and data that we released as part of the challenge. The clearways data that we published to the Open Data Hub on Wednesday October 3 contains information about all NSW clearways including the road sections as a shapefile. We encourage you to use the data and any other datasets available to formulate your solution. All our data can be found in the data catalogue on the Open Data Hub.
We have also set three problem statements that we expect you to address with your idea:
How can we improve driver’s awareness of clearway restrictions?
How can we improve how the TMC is notified of stationary vehicles in clearways, transit lanes or bus lanes?
How can we advise a driver the location of their towed vehicle?
As with most of our innovation challenges, we held an information session on October 3 to officially launch the NSW Clearways dataset, provide further information about the challenge and answer any questions that attendees had. You can find the full recording of the information session on the landing page of the challenge as well as the transcribed Q&A section on the FAQs page. If you have any further questions before applications close you can ask us in the dedicated Open Data Forum thread. We strongly recommend that you read and have a look at all of these resources to make sure your submission meets all the outlined criteria and requirements.
A pitch day for selected participants will follow the closure of the challenge where winners will then be selected for incubation, with the aim to launch their products by April 2019.
We wish all participants the best of luck! Looking forward to see what great concepts you all come up with.
- The TfNSW Open Data and Innovation Team