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

The average person in a major Australian city loses 80 hours a year to traffic. Oliver Looker on what it takes to actually measure congestion across a whole city. In this episode of Location Matters, host Nick Chai is joined by Oliver Looker, Director of Transport and Smart Cities at NGIS. The average person 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 use, refreshed every two minutes and covering a whole city without a single new camera in the ground. He also covers how it compares with SCATS, how AI predicts the impact of storms and major events, and a case study from Thessaloniki that measured a 40% travel-time impact. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:14 From pharmacy to geospatial 1:42 What GIS looked like in the 1990s 2:58 How Oliver joined NGIS 4:24 A Google Maps Platform award 4:59 What TraceMark Flow is 5:54 Ten years with Transport for NSW 6:21 The cost of congestion 7:51 Why coverage and scale matter 9:13 Predictability, the key metric 10:05 Compared with SCATS and loop sensors 11:47 Where AI comes in 13:23 Network resilience and flood risk 14:26 Situational awareness and digital twins 15:31 Asking the platform a question 16:26 Case study: Thessaloniki 19:12 Refreshed every two minutes 20:04 The cost of physical sensors 22:07 What implementation involves 23:49 Congestion nobody knew about 25:58 Prioritising by road, incident and role RESOURCES MENTIONED TraceMark Flow, NGIS's transport management platform https://tracemarkflow.com TraceMark, the wider NGIS product suite https://tracemark.com NGIS https://ngis.com.au ITS Australia https://its-australia.com.au Creating Smarter Cities eBook https://2ab8h.share.hsforms.com/27NSv... Also discussed: Google Road Management Insights, the traffic dataset within Google Maps Platform that TraceMark Flow is built on; SCATS, the adaptive traffic signal control system developed by Transport for NSW; and Google Maps and Waze, the source of the user-generated disruption reports covered in the episode. ABOUT 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. Location Matters is a podcast by NGIS, exploring impactful stories through the lens of geospatial technology. Find more episodes at https://ngis.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Know someone working in transport, local government, logistics or geospatial technology? Share this episode with them. #SmartCities #GIS #Geospatial #TrafficManagement #UrbanMobility