As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected.

The future of infrastructure isn't just smarter—it’s more integrated. And that integration starts with better visibility into the systems we already have.

In the post below, my cofounder Varun shares how we prototyped a low-cost, city-scale street survey in Syracuse—and how it hinted at something bigger: the power of continuous sensing, intelligent routing, and shared infrastructure data to inform smarter decisions. From waste collection routes to methane leak detection, there’s a throughline here that applies across every facet of urban management.

Efforts like CAMP4W are beginning to stitch together these threads—offering adaptive, region-wide planning frameworks that can be "open sourced" across agencies and sectors. But we need to go further. The tools are here. The data is cheap. The need is urgent. It's radically common sense to not artificially isolate utility maintenance by water or gas or power. Leveraging low cost sensors for integrated asset management and empowering adaptive approaches to managing this mission critical infrastructure is radically common sense.

It’s time to stop treating infrastructure as a patchwork of projects and start managing it as a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem.

In the previous post, I discussed how we implemented a low-cost citywide street quality survey in Syracuse.

An early challenge we faced was to develop easy to follow route plans for city workers to perform "complete" surveys across the city. At the time, we relied on the Syracuse public works department to follow their historical resurfacing plans and we just winged it.

That approach mostly worked but it left me wanting to "nerd harder" to scale more easily.

The academic literature references the Chinese Postman Problem or Route Inspection Problem, attributed to the Chinese Mathematician Meigu Guan on how to efficiently route postal workers to walk every street at least once and return to the starting point with minimal repetition.

As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected.

The future of infrastructure isn't just smarter—it’s more integrated. And that integration starts with better visibility into the systems we already have.

In the post below, my cofounder Varun shares how we prototyped a low-cost, city-scale street survey in Syracuse—and how it hinted at something bigger: the power of continuous sensing, intelligent routing, and shared infrastructure data to inform smarter decisions. From waste collection routes to methane leak detection, there’s a throughline here that applies across every facet of urban management.

Efforts like CAMP4W are beginning to stitch together these threads—offering adaptive, region-wide planning frameworks that can be "open sourced" across agencies and sectors. But we need to go further. The tools are here. The data is cheap. The need is urgent. It's radically common sense to not artificially isolate utility maintenance by water or gas or power. Leveraging low cost sensors for integrated asset management and empowering adaptive approaches to managing this mission critical infrastructure is radically common sense.

It’s time to stop treating infrastructure as a patchwork of projects and start managing it as a dynamic, interconnected ecosystem.

In the previous post, I discussed how we implemented a low-cost citywide street quality survey in Syracuse.

An early challenge we faced was to develop easy to follow route plans for city workers to perform "complete" surveys across the city. At the time, we relied on the Syracuse public works department to follow their historical resurfacing plans and we just winged it.

That approach mostly worked but it left me wanting to "nerd harder" to scale more easily.

The academic literature references the Chinese Postman Problem or Route Inspection Problem, attributed to the Chinese Mathematician Meigu Guan on how to efficiently route postal workers to walk every street at least once and return to the starting point with minimal repetition.