A Breath of Fresh Air for Syracuse's Southside Neighborhood
In Southside, most people don't own cars, live in poverty, take over 85 minutes to commute, and live in a food desert. The lack of mobility cuts off access to jobs and negatively impacts health outcomes. Limited mobility also has impacts on investment inflow and appeal for companies to set up businesses. Our project changes the narrative to one of hope, upliftment, and community success. We will build four energized pocket parks; upgrade traffic signals; implement City Scout, an active civic engagement tool; and deploy the Syracuse Smart Mobility Data Ecosystem (SSMDE). With these in place, we will incentivize the community to be active, encourage transit-oriented development, use traffic signals to prioritize electric vehicles, prepare for first/last mile micromobility solutions, and prepare to use electric autonomous food delivery vehicles. In the end, we will demonstrate measurable improvements in emissions, environmental justice, and community impact and transportation savings for households.
To encourage a community to become active, it helps to invest in things that give the community members a reason to be active. We will complete an urban green infrastructure master plan for Southside to include four new "energized" 5000 square feet pocket parks and opportunities to encourage transit-oriented development (TOD).
Each pocket park will have a 5G-enabled internet of things (IoT) zone. This will include edge computing for devices like air quality monitors, public safety surveillance systems such as cameras, emergency assistance call boxes, and sound monitoring devices. Gannett Fleming will work with the City and local leaders to conduct a community engagement activity that allows residents to help design and name each park.
Gannett Fleming will work with Syracuse to launch its City Scout Civic Engagement application. This hosted software app is designed to encourage users to get out into their communities and complete "missions".
Four signalized intersections, one near each energized pocket park, will be upgraded with new equipment to accommodate connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) with transit priority capabilities. Our team will prioritize low impact charging infrastructure, reducing the need for intensive grid modification, focusing on wayside storage solutions.
The team will build the Syracuse Surge Mobility Data Ecosystem (SSMDE). The system will be designed to scale and provide the core necessary functions for advanced mobility solutions.
This project will be successful when the energized pocket parks, upgraded traffic signals, and data ecosystem are available for use with a goal of being operational 18 months after notice to proceed (NTP).