My Life, My City: Jaromír Beránek, Prague

Cities Today talks to Jaromír Beránek, Chair of Prague’s IT and smart city committee.

What was your first job?

The first time I got paid for work was at the age of 12 when I was singing in a TV ad for lollipops. My first full-time job after university 13 years later was with Telefónica O2 in Prague where I worked in the financial reporting unit and learned all the secrets and magic with Excel spreadsheets.

What attracted you to your current role?

During my early years at work, I realised that I don’t want to stay somewhere in the background, have a 9-to-5 job and live happily ever after. In order to change things, I decided to join a young and liberal Pirate Party as a volunteer, and two years later, I got elected to the Prague City Assembly.

Since I always had a passion for advanced technologies and startups, our mayor offered me this role to develop new technological projects and expedite urban innovation in Prague.

What is your favourite part of the job?

In my position, I get to meet a lot of business partners and colleagues from other European cities. Luckily, in the technological field, these people are very smart and inspirational and I absolutely love to learn from them. Of course, the best reward is if I succeed in bringing some of the brilliant ideas to Prague and introduce a new service which is useful for our citizens.

What has been your biggest success in this role?

I’m very proud that me and my team managed to introduce new artificial intelligence curriculums for high school and university students thanks to a great cooperation with prg.ai, a technological cluster we founded jointly with Czech Technical University, Charles University and Czech Academy of Sciences.

I also enjoy hearing about the successes of startups that we incubate in Prague’s ESA BIC programme. And I must mention the steady development of multiple award-winning city data platform Golemio which we happily offer as an open-source application to other cities.

What has been your biggest setback or challenge?

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to implement our plan for faster electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployment. This particular project keeps falling sacrifice to political disagreements and I still can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

What are you working on right now that you’re excited about?

We are introducing a new feature to our public transportation mobile app: the intermodal trip planner. Thanks to this extension, Prague citizens and visitors will get a great tool to plan their city travels using a combination of all transit modes, be it metro, tram, shared bicycle, walking or your own car. The idea is to show people that micromobility may serve as a great supplement to other modes and we also hope to attract more car drivers to use more sustainable modes.

Last but not least, thanks to the collection and analysis of search queries, we will be able to design the public transportation service to be more efficient.

If you could wave a magic wand, what one thing would you fix in Prague?

Prague is a beautiful historical city which ranks among the most attractive places for tourists or expats. However, despite having one of the most convenient and reliable public transportation systems, the city is crowded with cars that take up a lot of public space. If a had a magic wand, I would cut the number of on-street parking spots in the centre at least by half, create new car-free zones and plant hundreds of new trees to help cool down our streets. Barcelona and Vienna’s ‘superblocks’ are a great inspiration for me in this regard.

What are you reading right now?

I enjoy reading books together with my girlfriend. We both love fantasy and during our last holiday, we started biting through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Not only is it great fun but besides writing, the author is doing research in the field of AI which is a topic that brought me and my girlfriend together.

Who has most inspired you in the work that you do?

I couldn’t name just one person because I meet a lot of great people all the time. Nevertheless, I owe a lot to my foreign travels and talks with my peers in other cities abroad. When I started working for the city four years ago, I thought Prague had many challenges unique to the city. The longer I’m in my position, the more I see that especially European cities fight very similar problems. I admire everyone who succeeds in employing data to justify their decisions and policy drafting as opposed to following ideology or public sentiments.

If you weren’t doing this job, what do you think you might be doing?

I would probably still be working for a startup accelerator and helping technological companies develop their business or maybe I would work for a startup myself.

What’s your favourite place in Prague and why?

I enjoy long walks or runs with scenic views. Prague is lucky to have many places which offer a stunning panorama of the city. One of my favourites lies in the Great Strahov Garden just beneath the Strahov Monastery.

• Time in role: Since November 2018
• Brief career history: Financial specialist, financial and portfolio manager, treasurer for Czech Pirate Party, leader of the Prague organisation of the Czech Pirate Party
• Career tip: Both in business and in ordinary life, you only have full control over the cost side. Never let circumstances make you do things you don’t enjoy doing just to cover the costs. It’s always better to cut them down and maintain your freedom.