Audi and the city of Somerville are planning joint innovations for the city of the future on the east coast of the USA. Audi CEO Rupert Stadler and Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone signed a Memorandum of Understanding in the context of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. They agreed to develop an urban strategy for Somerville, applying technologies for swarm intelligence or automated parking, and networking cars with traffic lights.
In the Memorandum of Understanding, Mayor Josef A. Curtatone and Rupert Stadler, chairman of the executive board of AUDI, agreed close cooperation in developing a new mobility strategy for Somerville. The focus is on exchanging know-how and testing new technologies.
Thanks to its central location in the Boston metropolitan area, Somerville is a role model for “smart cities.” After Silicon Valley this region has the fastest-growing economy in North America. In the coming years, Union Square in Somerville will be transformed into a flourishing city center. By means of urban redevolopment, new dwellings, offices and commercial real estate will be built. More people on the same surface area also means, however, that the existing mobility infrastructure reaches its limits. Therefore Audi is supporting the project at Union Square with innovations such as the traffic-light assistant. This will help traffic to flow faster.
In addition to networked infrastructure, Audi is bringing automated parking to the project. Self-parking cars result in three different benefits. Parking garages can be relocated from the city center to less attractive places. At the same time the parking area required per car is reduced by approximately two square meters. The cars park closer together and need fewer, much narrower lanes in garages, where pedestrian paths, elevators and stairs are no longer required. A parking garage of the same size can then take up to 60 percent more vehicles – sufficient to end curbside parking. Finally, there are fewer cars on the roads searching for a place to park.
