What impact do roadworks have on the vitality of downtown Montreal? Who, cyclists or motorists, visits local businesses more? We will soon have the answers to these kinds of questions thanks to a brand new cloud computing dashboard created by the Société de développement commercial (SDC) Montréal centre-ville in collaboration with Google Cloud.
“Until now, we had access to practically none of this data,” says the general manager of SDC Montreal downtown, Glenn Castanheira. “What really influences traffic? We really had no data on that. It didn’t exist, or it was owned by private companies. »
For its platform, the SDC will draw on the data provided in real time by partners such as the Moneris payment solution, the Eco-Counter pedestrian and cyclist counting service, Bixi Montreal and Statistics Canada, among others. This data will be brought together on a cloud computing platform created by Montreal employees of Google. Everything will take the form of a dashboard that will provide a portrait of the vitality of the part of downtown located between Atwater, Saint-Urbain, Saint-Antoine and Sherbrooke streets.
“We want to learn about people’s behavior and help businesses in all sectors — hospitality, retail, restaurants. Then we want to be able to compare ourselves with other city centers: Toronto and Vancouver, of course, then Chicago, Boston and maybe New York in the United States,” says Glenn Castanheira.
According to the Montreal organization, although other cities in North America compile different data like those used in its dashboard, there does not currently exist a unified solution like the one created with Google.
A public dashboard?
This dashboard is currently still under development. SDC Montréal centre-ville would like to make it accessible to the public no later than next spring. To do this, certain confidentiality clauses related to the data received by certain suppliers will have to be eliminated. If it fails to do so, the organization will instead publish quarterly reports from its platform.
Whatever the formula, SDC Montréal centre-ville wants to demystify the economic situation of the city center for good. “We want to be able to distinguish opinion from fact. Where is crime concentrated? Where do cyclists or motorists go to shop? This is the kind of information that we will be able to produce”, says its general manager.
The Business Development Corporation, which represents nearly 5,000 businesses, will analyze the correlations between all of this data and uncover big trends in how downtown workers, consumers and merchants are behaving. She hopes that this will help it make the right decisions to better enhance the attractiveness of downtown Montréal for all its customers.
The SDC may also formulate recommendations, which it will forward to the relevant authorities, such as the City of Montreal. “We want to help separate opinion from fact,” says Castanheira. For example, the SDC would like to dispel the impression that the downtown offices are deserted, while the occupancy rate is around 90%. “Next, we also want to help the City make the right decisions. We are not a lobby, we want to help the City to develop better. »
Above all, the SDC Montréal centre-ville hopes that this technology will help increase downtown economic activity. The organization is also looking for new datasets from other organizations to add to its dashboard. The use of on-street or public parking is cited as an example. The idea is to draw the most representative portrait possible of the city centre. In digital version.