It’s one thing to be told you’re safe and it’s another thing to feel safe

We can confirm that Smart Cities nowadays are already a reality and not a futuristic promise that is yet to come. Although there is still a long way to go in this area, there are already many municipalities that are carrying out their digital transformation process based on Smart Cities initiatives.

The fundamental objective of these initiatives is to connect urban elements to obtain information about them and their environment; and thus allow the municipal teams to make better decisions.

For some years now we have been observing how the municipalities implement technological initiatives to optimize, on the one hand, public resources and, on the other, to offer a better service to the citizen.

Smart Cities are already a reality

Although each municipality prioritizes and implements the different initiatives based on their needs and their situation, there are projects that are already a reality. Some of these projects are:

• Light management: optimize the use of public lights to reduce the cost of electricity by more than 30% thanks to telemanagement and predictive maintenance.

• Waste management: achieve a more efficient management of urban waste, optimize service costs and reduce the ecological footprint.
• Parking management: optimize the occupation of public parking spaces while reducing traffic and pollution levels in the city
• Management of security and emergency bodies: effectively distribute agents in the field while reducing the response time of any incident. 

Many of these initiatives have a common factor: the management of assets in mobility, whether vehicles, waste containers or personnel in the field. That is why mobility solutions are fundamental in any project of this nature.

Knowing in each moment the situation of all these assets, programming the most efficient routes based on the necessary work, ensuring the correct use of the vehicles or responding quickly to an unexpected need are some of the benefits and solutions that this type of internet of things brings.

Some of our clients, as is the case of the municipality of San Nicolás de Los Arroyos in Argentina, has already managed to recover the investment in a fast way thanks to the saving of fuel, the reduction of maintenance costs and the reduction of incidents of traffic.

The Municipality has obtained real benefits from the integration of digital solutions, such as:

– Patrol vehicles have saved up to 20% fuel.

– Patrolled streets have been increased from 80% to 100%.

– The response time of the patrols has been reduced by 15%.

On the other hand, the residents of the city have been able to improve the way they make their queries, suggestions and complaints to the municipality as it has made available channels such as social networks, sms, web forms or a telephone contact available. All this has allowed improving the attention of the neighbors in a centralized and fast way.

“It is one thing to be told that you are safe, and another thing is to feel safe” – says Soledad Belaza, a resident of the Municipality – since 100% of the streets of the city are patrolled through the installation of GPS devices.

“It is one thing to be told that you are safe, and another thing is to feel safe”

In addition, the Municipality decided to launch an information campaign on the routes of garbage trucks, thanks to the GPS devices installed in the vehicles. In this way, the residents of San Nicolás de los Arroyos know when to take the garbage out and thanks to that the city is cleaner and tidier.

“In a city nothing is easy, – says Cesar Mediavilla of Telefónica – but when connecting things, they give us information as simple as knowing where a vehicle is at each moment”; and from here, we can change many other things and most importantly, improve people’s lives and their safety.

Know more about the digital transformation of San Nicolás de los Arroyos.