The AI Powering Smarter Cities: What's Ahead for ITS

In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai is joined by Oliver Looker, Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS, to talk about what it actually takes to measure road congestion across an entire city. The average person living in a major Australian city loses around 80 hours a year to traffic, and building more roads is rarely the affordable answer.Oliver explains how TraceMark Flow turns Google's Road Management Insights data into something transport agencies can work with, refreshed every two minutes and covering a whole city or a whole country without putting a single new camera or sensor in the ground. He also covers how the approach compares with SCATS and inductive loop sensors, where AI fits into predicting the effect of storms and big events, a case study from Thessaloniki that measured a 40% travel time impact from a major road project, and why the congestion an agency knows about is often not the congestion costing it the most.Key Topics Covered:[0:14] Meet Oliver Looker, and the plan to become a pharmacist that turned into a career in geospatial[1:42] MapInfo, Arc/Info and ArcView: what GIS looked like in the 1990s[2:58] Conservation and Land Management, the UK, and a knock at the door from NGIS co-founder Richard Bentley[4:24] Winning a Google Maps Platform award for TraceMark Flow[4:59] What TraceMark Flow is: tools built around Google's Road Management Insights data[5:54] A ten year journey, starting with Transport for NSW in 2015[6:21] The cost of congestion, from 80 hours a year in Australian cities to $293 billion across the US and Europe[7:51] Why coverage and scale matter more than any single sensor[9:13] Predictability: the metric transport agencies actually care about, from airport runs to freight corridors[10:05] How TraceMark Flow compares with SCATS, inductive loops and CCTV, and why it complements rather than replaces them[11:47] Where AI comes in: predicting the effect of weather events, storms and big crowds[13:23] Network resilience, and modelling flood and cyclone risk to road infrastructure out to 2040[14:26] Situational awareness today, digital twins next[15:31] Asking the platform a plain-language question and getting the insight back[16:26] Case study in Thessaloniki: measuring a 40% travel time impact from a major flyover project[19:12] Anonymised, aggregated, and refreshed every two minutes[20:04] Why building out a physical sensor network is cost prohibitive, and what happens when half of it stops working[22:07] What implementation involves, and why it is a matter of weeks[23:49] Finding congestion nobody knew about, from traffic light phasing to potholes in New Zealand[25:58] Prioritising roads, incident types and reporting by role[27:15] Where to find TraceMark FlowResources Mentioned:TraceMark Flow, NGIS's transport management platformTraceMark, the wider NGIS product suiteNGISGoogle Road Management Insights, the traffic dataset within Google Maps Platform that TraceMark Flow is built onCreating Smarter Cities eBookSCATS, the adaptive traffic signal control system developed by Transport for NSWGoogle Maps and Waze, the source of the user-generated disruption reports discussed in the episodeITS AustraliaAbout the Guest: Oliver Looker is Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS and an active member of ITS Australia. With more than 25 years in spatial science, he believes location intelligence is the key to the future of transport and sustainability. Oliver studied at Curtin University, began his career with Western Australia's Department of Conservation and Land Management and an agricultural consultancy in the UK, and joined NGIS in 2004. He now leads the team behind TraceMark Flow, which won a Google Maps Platform award in 2025 for its work turning Google's road data into decision-ready intelligence for transport agencies, logistics operators and emergency services.Know someone working in transport, local government, logistics or geospatial technology? Share this episode with them.