Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

From autonomous vehicle sensors on city streets to real-time crowd monitoring on Broadway, Tennessee’s transportation future was on full display at the Tennessee Smart Mobility Expo, hosted by TennSMART at GEODIS Park. 

While there were many insightful panels throughout the day, here are some highlights.

Mobility is an experience

Vishnu Jayamohan of Nissan North America opened the day with a keynote that gently pushed back on the industry’s current AI obsession, framing it as one tool among many rather than a sole strategy. Instead, he offered three principles he said should anchor any mobility innovation effort: clarity, simplicity and end-to-end experience.

“Being clear about what you’re not going to do helps you determine what you will do,” he said. “No organization can lead everything, and an unfocused effort gets noisy. Simplicity means reducing friction between innovation and the customer, both in how products are merchandised and how they’re communicated. Complexity erodes trust, and that trust is essential to the full customer journey, not just a collection of mobility features.”

Putting mobility tools to work

A panel titled “The Future in Motion: City Projects Delivering Results” brought together Mina Sartipi of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Ross Wang of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Brad Freeze of the Nashville Department of Transportation (NDOT) and Jonathan Sprinkle of Vanderbilt University to share how their organizations are deploying smart mobility tools in the real world.

Sartipi, who has spent two decades in applied transportation research, moderated. “What I really love about this panel is that you’ll hear about amazing work that is a true public-private partnership between a university, the research lab and city of Nashville,” she said. “And then really taking this work and saying, how can we solve a real problem that exists?”

Sprinkle described research that began in 2021 to examine how individual driving behavior ripples through traffic. Working with the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT), his team built the I-24 MOTION corridor, a network of high-resolution cameras tracking traffic patterns continuously. That work has since expanded to LIDAR sensors deployed on select city streets and adaptive systems that can adjust freeway speed limits in real time based on congestion.

Freeze described a distinct challenge: lower Broadway. With its volume of pedestrians, concerts and events, the corridor between 1st and 5th avenues is among the most complex mobility environments in the state. NDOT has deployed LIDAR sensors to monitor crowd density in real time, with an alerting tool being built in partnership with the Metro Nashville Network. When sidewalk capacity approaches its limit, operators will get an automated notification so they can make an informed decision about closing the street.

All panelists agreed that the biggest pro to mobility innovation is the data collected, which in turns informs better decision making.

“We understand these closing street decisions impact the local economy. Broadway is a really important part of Tennessee’s tourism revenue,” said Freeze. “Similarly, when sensors revealed pedestrians repeatedly crossing mid-block in one corridor, the root cause ended up being to catch a bus on the other side of the street on time. An easily-placed crosswalk, rather than a complex intervention, can deliver a huge safety benefit at little cost. When you see this data, you can improve the community.”

East Tennessee shoutout

With the conference held in Nashville this year, many sessions featured Nashville-based projects. But, Knoxville’s Spark Innovation Center got a spotlight as well. Representatives from the center shared how its Spark Mobility Lab, a new program designed to equip early-stage mobility founders with technical and economic tools, is helping startups scale alongside industry engagement and investor readiness support.

Fuel Daddy, a company that went through the inaugural cohort, got to run through their elevator pitch. Read more about Fuel Daddy and the Spark Mobility Lab in our recent coverage.

Looking to the future

Panelists pointed to a few trends shaping where smart transportation is headed.

Systems engineering, real institutional partnerships and early community engagement are what separate projects that make it into permanent infrastructure from those that stall at the pilot stage.

LIDAR tech has helped ease public concerns because it does not capture identifying information, but panelists said transparency remains essential regardless of the technology. Digital twinning is also on the rise as a way to model and test transportation changes before they’re built, giving communities a voice and a sense of transparency without slowing innovation.

But when asked how Tennessee can scale smart transportation even more, speakers throughout the programming were unified: partnerships. It’s part of why gatherings like the Tennessee Smart Mobility Expo and consortia like TennSMART are so needed.

To close the day, TennSMART leaders reflected on where the organization is headed.

With a 10th anniversary on the horizon and more than $35 million in awarded research grants, leadership said they are focused on deepening work in AI and digital twinning while finding more ways to support the startup community. One avenue being explored is more formal thought leadership, and they are actively seeking collaboration and feedback on how to best push this initiative out.

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