Bonus Episode: Technology Innovations in the City of Stirling

Subscriber-only episode

A special bonus episode the Roundup: host Chris Eddy is joined by Mayor Mark Irwin from WA's City of Stirling to talk about the innovative use of AI technology in community engagement, and the exciting announcement of Australia's first trackless tram which is headed to Stirling later this year.

"By dreaming big, by being bold and being innovative, we can find solutions that will deliver the same outcomes but in a net zero sustainable way."

The City of Stirling is using AI technology called Ainsley to gather information for their community infrastructure plan.
The traditional engagement methods used by local government are not always effective in reaching all age groups and suburbs equally.
Ainsley allows for increased community engagement by making it easy, visible, and fun for residents to provide input.
The City of Stirling is also exploring the use of trackless tram technology for sustainable transportation.
They have visited China to learn about trackless trams and will have the first one delivered in November this year.
The trackless trams run on hydrogen and will be trialed in the City of Stirling to showcase the technology.
The City of Stirling aims to be at the cutting edge of technology use and lead the way for other local governments.  

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Links for stories referenced in the podcast can be found in the transcript, or by visiting the Roundup website.

Transcript

Delighted to have the Mayor of the City of Stirling, Mark Irwin, with me. 

Mr. Mayor, welcome to the podcast, it's great to have you on the Roundup. 

Thanks for having me, Chris, pleasure to be here. 

And I'm really keen to hear your take on this new use of AI that's getting quite a bit of attention there in the City of Stirling, a first for Western Australia. Tell me about Ainsley. 

Well, we're pretty excited about using any new technology. We often talk about as a large local government, we should try to be innovative and dream big and be bold. It's not always as easy as that to do it, especially because local government is almost set up to be the opposite sometimes, very conservative and wait till someone else does it. And that's normally reserved for private enterprise. 

Look, the artificial intelligence, that's where the Ainslie comes from, the AI, the start of Ainsley is the word, it's about trying to personalise the technology. But for us, it's also just about the key to what local government is all about. We talk about engaging with our community, we talk about community led leadership and how do we get that information into us? 

So as I understand it, you're using it in this instance to gather information specifically about developing your community infrastructure plan. Have I got that right? 

Yes. So the community infrastructure plan for 23 to 2033, it's going to guide all of the city's planning, our delivery of our community infrastructure. And it's about finding out what our community wants in the future, where they want to work, live and play, what sort of infrastructure will be needed for that. And again, one of the first things we do then is talk about let's engage with the community. 

Our traditional engagement methods, whilst we often talk about how proactive we are, they don't tend to get the engagement across all age groups, they don't tend to get the engagement across all suburbs equally. And quite often we're basing a lot of our future infrastructure plans or future plans for the city on a fairly small sample number. So this is about trying to increase that. 

Yes. One of the reasons I was a bit fascinated, Mark, about this is having been involved in the early stages of a community infrastructure plan, it's really difficult, isn't it? You know you're probably going to be faced with some challenging decisions with limited resources and you want to be able to base that on the best information and the best sense of what the community wants, don't you? But it's not always easy to get that info. 

No, and we tend to see at any engagement level in local government especially, you tend to engage with people when they're unhappy. You know, people don't often ring up our customer service centre and just say, hey, I just wanted to comment with you on how nice you pruned those trees or, hey, I love that new footpath that went down the road. It's normally at a time when it really affects them. 

So when we put out an engagement piece for the future of community infrastructure, it would be fair to say there's probably a lot of people who don't feel like it's important to them right at this time. It's not the big priority in their life. It's not perhaps affecting them or they could be very happy with the infrastructure. 

So this is about trying to make it as easy as possible to engage, making it very visible and also making it a bit fun. Yeah. So give us a bit of an insight into how you got here with this use of AI because I know a lot of councils around the country, they see AI coming, they don't necessarily have a clear picture of what it can do for them. 

How did you settle on this particular use of AI? 

Well, it's probably as simple as just finding the right person who wanted to be innovative. It's fair to say for the last few years, we've tried, again, as a very large and sometimes probably a bit old fashioned council, we've tried different methods of being more modern in the way we look at place. 

Council's been very determined to get there and we now have the right team in place. We're talking about a place-led approach to how we do things. We really want to make sure that when we're doing something, we're doing it for the right reasons and we're doing it because the community want it. 

As part of that, our new place team led by James did some investigations and found a program called Hello Lamp Post. It's a UK-based company, started in 2018, and it was basically looking at the role technology does in making cities and making them better places. From that, he found Ainsley. 

And so on investigation, it's been quite successful in increasing engagement over in Sydney and also in UK-based local government. So we're trialling it. We're excited with the results to date. It's only been in place for about a week, but we're certainly hopeful that it will deliver what we want, and that is increased community engagement. 

Yes, so you say it's only been in place for a week and it is a trial, but you, I assume, will keep it in place until you get to a point where you've got enough input for your community infrastructure plan or you're using it in part with other tools too? 

Yes, so we're still using traditional survey methods and we still have our website, which is people are able to go on there and have your say. 

The engagement for the community infrastructure piece goes for about 24 days. And again, going back to my previous comments, when you look at those engagement pieces we do, whether it be our community strategic plan or perhaps local issues around traffic calming or delivery of an urban infill project, any of those things, it's just another engagement piece where people might think, oh, we've already done this. 

So what we're finding already, it's only been going for about a week. The QR codes, people are able to interact by either clicking on the QR code or by texting a message to Ainslie and then start an interactive conversation. So far over the past week, there's been 150 conversations or interactions with Ainslie. 

Now, comparing that to the traditional survey methods, they're down below 20 still. So far it's been positive and we're very hopeful it's going to deliver the results we want. 

Yes, because I guess you're getting people at the site and that's one of the beauties of this, isn't it? Where do you see, Mark, or where would you like to see the engagement happen that perhaps you haven't been able to plug into in the past? Because you've got parks, playgrounds, community centres. Are there any particular problem areas in that mix that you want to hear from people about? 

I think it's about being where people are. What we tend to do with traditional consultation is wait for an event to happen. So they tend to happen in maybe the more vibrant centres and obviously people might have a better mindset straight away. 

For example, if we were to go to Inglewood night markets on a Monday night, it's an obvious place. We know there's going to be thousands of people there. The standard method would be set up a tent, get some community engagement officers there. Or if we were running an event in Mirabooka perhaps to put a tent up or Scarborough markets. Again, the problem with that is it does sway results because we're already dealing with people who are interacting with the community, maybe people who are really excited to be there. 

This is about delivering across many locations. So 42 locations across the city, some of those areas we might not traditionally do any consultation in. And people are effectively able to interact with a path bench or a tree. And yeah, it's got that kind of quirky feel about it, something a bit more innovative. And from that, we also hope to attract the younger age set who don't traditionally engage with us in survey forms. 

Makes perfect sense. And I wonder if your mind has already started to think about other uses for this technology potentially? 

Without a doubt. I think already I did some simple sums. And if you looked at, for example, Ainslie over a 12 month period, the license to have the programming, etc., the equivalent of that, I think just across these 42 locations, if we were to put the resources and one staff member in each of those 42 locations for one day, it's already paid for itself. 

So potentially this gives us the ability once the technology is paid for, for us to be able to use this for all of our engagement strategies. When we're doing something in an area, we quite often say the first thing we should do is go and consult. 

So even on the agenda this week, we've got Pelican Crossings on a road. We have programs that are going to be operating in a particular suburb or traffic calming in another suburb. 

By putting this engagement piece there and across different areas around there, we can interact with all those people and try to make sure that we hear from more and more people across different demographics. 

Have you had other mayors, other councils getting in touch to say, how is this working for you and how did you go about it? 

I haven't yet, but I'm guessing many of them, again, as I said before, local governments are risk adverse. So most of them will wait and see how it goes, see if there's any positive or negative publicity around it. We're certainly hoping that we get feedback from our community on how the program is working as well. 

We've already started to receive a bit of feedback and that's good as well. Some people are worried that we're trying to replace people. Some people are really positive, saying it's a great method. 

Look, all of those things can be addressed. This is new technology. Ainsley will improve. We're hoping we can find ways we can improve the way we deliver it. We're even already talking about, rather than just having QR codes on our traditional park benches, what Ainsley might look like in the future. 

Yeah. And I guess you ought to think about while you've got those people engaged on that particular issue, how do you capture them on other issues? Or if someone is talking to your Ainslie and wants to raise another issue, can they do that yet? Or is that... 

Yeah, they can. So it's very interactive and we've already, even in our traditional survey methods, tried to do that. 

If we're consulting in a particular area on a single issue, we will also include other questions to try to build that base. What we're trying to build is as much information on place because what is totally appropriate for an area in North Beach isn't going to be appropriate for an area in Wembley Downs or in Doubleview or in Balgove or in Mount Lawley. They're such different areas. 

People have different needs, different expectations. And it's important we capture that because ultimately it's a place where our community want to live in the future. They want their children to live and they want them to enjoy it. 

Well, I think it's fascinating and certainly hope it's as successful as it looks like it's going to be. And you'd be pleased with the media attention that's getting, I imagine, and hopefully the resident attention follows. 

Yeah. And I think any artificial intelligence has its risks involved. So we're all very cautious. We're all wondering what the future holds with artificial intelligence. As part of that, I think it's really important we trial it in a really controlled way and understand that people's data isn't being collected, understand that the risks are very low. 

But if we can get the very best out of artificial intelligence while making sure we don't get those bad things, then I think the future is looking bright. 

While I have you, Mark, if you don't mind, I understand you're just back from China looking into trackless tram technology. How did that trip go? 

Yeah, fantastic. And this is another piece of innovation, I guess. Look, everyone's very familiar with what a train is, the metro line that goes through and connects our city. Everyone's very familiar with buses as well. 

They're essentially transport options. In the middle of those two is something called mid-tier transport. And mid-tier transport is not just about moving people. It's about land development or land use development. 

So if we look at where our future populations will live, local governments work very hard to ensure that the population density isn't going to be through the old traditional infill methods that have seen some pretty poor outcomes to be fair, where we've seen wall-to-wall buildings. 

It's about putting density in higher developments and it's about putting the density on corridors. To do that, it's really essential that the transport network is efficient, reliable, comfortable, and it's got to be a level above buses because we know that traditionally we don't love jumping on a bus. 

Mid-tier transit is about creating a light rail solution down a corridor so that people will sell their second car when they move into their apartment. So we came across Professor Peter Newman from Curtin University a number of years ago and have been working closely with him and other local governments in developing a mid-tier transit strategy. The state government is on board with the mid-tier transport strategy. 

What we're trying to show as a local government is by dreaming big, by being bold and being innovative, we can find solutions that will deliver the same outcomes but in a net zero sustainable way. 

So to do this, we went to China. We're very aware of the trackless trams. They are running at Lingyong at the moment in China. The factory CRRC is in Nanjing. So we visited those cities. We saw the technology. We rode on the technology. 

We've now negotiated, and I'm pleased to tell you that in November this year, we will have the first trackless tram delivered to the city of Stirling. That technology will then be trialled in the city of Stirling for all of the public, anyone who wants to come and see it and ride it. And what we want to do is showcase this technology, show how comfortable it is to ride. See how spectacular it looks. 

And we really think there's opportunity here for the future where we can deliver something along a corridor that is net zero. So these are run on hydrogen. 

Yeah, right, right. That's extraordinary, Mark. 
So November this year, that's pretty quick and that's clearly a first for WA. What about for the rest of the country? 

Yeah, so the federal government's been on board for a few years now. There's about three or four business case that have been funded around Australia that we know of through the federal government. We were one of the first to get funding for the business case. 

The business case will shortly be presented to council and then made public. This will be the first of this type of technology, the first trackless tram to ever be delivered into Australia. So we're pretty excited about it. 

Leading the way on technology in the city of Stirling, is that part of your strategic plan to be at the cutting edge of technology use? 

Yeah, it is. And I think it's also not just part of our strategic plan. I think it's incumbent on us as the largest local government. You know, we often use those terms. We're the largest local government. 

With that comes the responsibility to perhaps even take the bigger risks and to make sure that we lead the sector for the future so that other local governments can follow, be innovative, make sure we've got a bright future for everyone. 

Fantastic. Well, thank you for telling us about that. Looking forward to hearing more about the trackless tram and how Ainslie goes. 

And I really do appreciate your time. Mayor Mark Irwin from the city of Stirling here on the Local Government News Roundup. 

Thanks for having me, Chris.