Two phases, and the difference between them is the difference between advising and owning.
Architecture review, from 2006
The city’s architecture review on transit ITS proposals from the Jacksonville Transportation Authority. The first was a bus priority scheme on Atlantic Boulevard, asking whether a Wi-Fi link could carry priority requests from a moving bus into a traffic signal cabinet — against the alternatives the city already used: strobe, inductive loop, or an AVL feed wired straight into the signal platform.
The question put to me was not whether the radio worked. It was whether it fit the wider city network. That is the right question, and it is the one that rarely gets asked early enough — by the time a pilot has proved a radio link works, the decision about what it connects to has usually been made by default.
Owning the interface, from 2013
From 2013 the interface itself: the physical fiber interconnect between the two agencies, the addressing handed across it, and the firewall rule set governing what each side could reach.
Two public agencies, two security postures, one demarcation. The rules on it had to be agreed rather than imposed, because neither authority could direct the other — the same constraint that governed everything else in this estate, in its purest form.
The build-outs that followed
The US1 Transit Signal Priority interconnect. A bus rapid transit north corridor that opened on a licensed point-to-point radio link standing in for fiber still being designed and installed. And downtown public access points mounted on structures the city did not own, which turned an access-point placement exercise into a memorandum of understanding with the transportation authority, executed before a single mount went up.
Infrastructure on somebody else’s asset is a legal instrument with a radio attached.
Outcome
A demarcation between two independent public authorities whose rules were agreed rather than imposed, because neither could compel the other.