ITS Challenge - Final Results

I recently participated in the ITS Challenge, a contest to identify intelligent transport system (ITS) ideas for helping reduce congestion. My proposal, Bus Meister, was not selected as one of the nine finalists. I blogged previously on my assessment of the nine ITS Challenge finalists.

Yesterday the results were announced in Stockholm (hence the photo above) and the solutions I liked best did not win. The best I did was a 3rd place for iCone, a very nice application for helping provide ITS in construction areas and for special events (it got 7% of the votes).

My favorite application in the contest was skymeter, a proven system for efficient roadway user charging. It only received 5% of the vote. As we move to electric vehicles and more fuel efficient vehicles road user charging systems will be needed to replace the gas tax, and more relevant to the contest's goal of reducing congestion: using road pricing creatively can make a huge impact on congestion.

The winning application was iCarpool.com with 54% of the votes. iCarpool is doing very nice work, but their system did not seem to be anything special. I thought the other carpool application in the contest, Avego (5% of votes), was a bit more innovative and better (check out the Avego YouTube video description).

The second place application, with 18% of the votes, was fuelclinic.com, an application that helps users use less fuel and drive more responsibly. Again, not bad, but not really earth shaking.

The VenCorps Blog summarizes the results and refers to a full press release with more details.

I guess I have to wonder about the process. First it was a little unclear how the top nine applications were chosen. As I mentioned in my earlier posting, most of them did not seem particularly innovative. Second, it seems odd that the winner would get so large a percentage of the votes, especially a relatively plain vanilla (for people working in the transport planning field) application (IMHO). As I said, nice application, but ...

Perhaps the contest sponsors were over represented in the voting? While anyone could vote, you needed to sign-up on the VenCorps website, a somewhat involved process. In many ways I think that the main sponsors (IBM, ITS America) are relatively conservative organizations and the results probably reflect this bias. Who knows?