How Citywide Service Solutions is using AI technology and sustainability initiatives on Melbourne’s pavements, footpaths and bike lanes to help reinvigorate the city post COVID.
For a dynamic city like Melbourne, continuing to rank as one of the world’s top cities does not come without effort.
Melbourne broke a record in 2017 when it became the first to be declared ‘the world’s most liveable city’ by the Economist Intelligence Unit for seven consecutive years – a position it has since given up, while remaining on the top ten list.
But what goes behind keeping the city world-class?
Citywide Service Solutions has been looking after the management of traffic, waste, arboriculture and civil infrastructure services for various local councils in Melbourne for decades.
Leigh Goullet, Operations Manager for Citywide’s City of Melbourne Infrastructure Services contract, says it requires intimate knowledge of the city, a solid and trusting partnership with the customer and a shared passion to make the city better.
Having rolled out a range of innovative and sustainable practices across the city in recent years, Citywide’s Melbourne civil infrastructure team is now taking its services to a new level by adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology to improve how it maintains pavements, footpaths, kerbs, and drainage systems.
The team is piloting the use of its fleet of vehicles, including garbage trucks and e-cargo bikes, equipped with AI-enabled surveillance cameras, to capture road and footpath defects – with the result being faster fixes, safer roads and increased community satisfaction.
Goullet says the technology provides an extra pairs of eyes to identify defects such as crocodile cracking on roads, broken pavements, overgrown trees, graffiti, or any other eyesore on their path that requires immediate attention.
“The beauty of it,” he says, “is that we don’t need to allocate extra resources to capture these defects. Our vehicles navigate the same areas multiple times per day, so the data we collect is very clean. It’s also a richer data set than we could get with a single pass of an intelligence surveillance vehicle or an individual, so it makes sure that we don’t miss any defects.”
The technology has been on trial for only a few months and Citywide is currently running it on garbage trucks and electric cargo bikes. Though relatively new, Goullet says the trial’s implications for Citywide’s operations are extensive.
“By using a phone camera securely mounted on the dashboard of any vehicle, we can capture high-resolution images in rich detail. Eventually, we could use every vehicle in our fleet, from tree trucks to chipper trucks, and even elevated work platforms already in operation across the city as extra eyes on the road, picking up all types of defects,” he says.
Through integration with workflow processes used by Citywide as the contractor and its customer – in this case, the City of Melbourne Council – the intelligent system can also generate automated work orders and auto-schedule crews to complete the jobs in order of priority.
“We are also looking to customise the tool to be used across a number of our contracts, from tree management to asset management, with certain variations. The goal is to improve safety for Melbourne residents by picking up and addressing defects before the assets degrade too much,” says Goullet.
Going big on sustainability
The latest trial from Citywide adds to a range of innovations the company has been engaged with in recent years across the City of Melbourne.
Since 2018, Citywide has been adopting the use of e-bikes from Good Cycles social enterprise to provide various nimble services across the inner suburbs of Melbourne, leading to minimised road trips, reduced vehicle congestion and fewer carbon emissions.
As part of the arrangement, riders hired by Good Cycles from among disadvantaged and at-risk youth, provide maintenance services, such as collecting and disposing e-waste and organic food waste from residents, inspecting and maintaining solar bins, and reporting on road and footpath defects.
In another initiative aimed at promoting the circular economy, late last year Citywide unveiled a world-class glass recycling plant at its West Melbourne site capable of cleaning glass from co-mingled bins. The new plant would be able to recycle challenging glass loads that could not be treated by other plants due to their small particle size or contamination with plastics or paper.
The high-quality, manufactured glass sand is now being used in the construction of bicycle lane separators and kerbs in Melbourne. Recycled glass is also used by the Citywide Asphalt Group in the production of its suite of GreenPave recycled asphalt products.
Goullet says these and other such initiatives are all part of Citywide’s efforts to contribute to the circular economy.
“Having our Resource Recovery and Waste Transfer Station in West Melbourne located in close proximity to the city makes it a valuable innovation hub to trial new and emerging technologies in a timely manner,” he observes.
Goullet says Citywide is also currently undergoing a digital transformation, aiming to make its internal processes more efficient through automation.
“It’s all about tidying and streamlining our operations, leading to real practical outcomes for our clients,” Goullet says. “Across all traditional heavy industries, key players are now paddling tech solutions. We at Citywide are very much part of that.”
As Melbourne gears up to recover from nearly two years of recurring COVID lockdowns, which saw a hit to its global liveability ranking, Goullet says Citywide is proud to play its part in reinvigorating the city.
“By virtue of our heritage, being established by the City of Melbourne nearly three decades ago, we know how this city’s wheels turn. Melbourne is in our DNA. So being able to trial these amazing technologies and forging partnerships to make Melbourne an even better place to live is a point of pride for us at Citywide,” he says.
“We feel very fortunate to be in this position, to be able to roll out sustainability initiatives that help reactivate the city post COVID and keep it moving.”
This article was originally published in the June edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.
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