The smart city starts with the basic services cities provide and we often take for granted. These services include

  • Parking
  • Traffic management (or a seeming lack thereof)
  • Public transit
  • Crime prevention
  • Waste removal
  • Street lighting
  • Water
  • Electricity
  • Other infrastructure

Every single one of these things can be enhanced in fundamental ways with wireless connectivity.

Parking can be automated and interacted with via mobile apps. Traffic management can be adaptive and optimized given actual traffic patterns leading to fewer traffic incidents and accidents, and fewer traffic jams. Public transit can improve its scheduling and notifications providing more timely service and optimized routing. Crime prevention from better monitoring and detection. Responsive waste removal that empties areas in a more timely fashion and reduces drive around time checking still empty cans. Street lighting that has programmable and dynamic lighting scheduling and dimming, reducing time on and thus electricity and tax dollars spent. Water flow and leak detection reducing wasted water. Electricity monitoring using fault circuit indicators so that outages are reported automatically. Roadway, bridge and other infrastructure including wear and tear detection for targeted upkeep and reduced tear-down and rebuilds.

And these fundamental changes pass convenience and savings directly to the taxpayer. Through advanced water leakage detection and repair policies, Tokyo was able to reduce its water leakage rate from 20% to 3.6%. This means 1 in 5 gallons of water was wasted by leakage before their initiative and afterwards, it was 1 in 277. That is a pretty dramatic result. Imagine those kinds of results cascading across all of the services discussed. Parking that is practically seamless. Traffic jams being a rarity rather than expected. Reductions in taxpayer dollars spent rather than annual increases. These are all achievable, and the technology is ready for it today.

Download our smart city case study and learn one way RPMA has enabled the smart city.