Megatrends Driving Technology : Urban Living

55 percent of the world population is already living in cities and it is steadily increasing. The average traffic speed in these cities is as low as 6-8 Km/hour, air/noise pollution levels are on the rise and even emergency assistance takes considerable amount of time. Similar to the traffic situation, the services like public transport, water, solid waste, energy, health care, citizen security etc are also facing similar challenges to cope up with the scale of urbanization.

Beyond the infrastructure development like roads, public transport, parking spaces, affordable housing etc, this also drives the need for integration of devices, applications and services on a reliable and scalable technology platform to manage, operate and optimize them and also add new services.

Fix the Basics : It is not that the city’s physical infrastructure is too bad to be in this situation but the throughput of the city services. As the first step, it is important to digitise the city services to bring some level of automation, like the ones mentioned below, which will also help to manage and them through insights and trends.

1.    Camera based Automated traffic violation detection, e-tickets.

2.    RFID based road access and toll collection.

3.    GPS based public bus tracking, Electronic fare collection. 

4.    Mobile app based parking search, booking, payment.

5.    Video surveillance, mobile based crowd sourcing, automated security alerts.

6.    Co-ordinated (police, fire and ambulance) emergency response system.

7.    Digital messaging boards, IP PA systems for public communication.

8.    Adaptive traffic signals with hurry call and compensation. 

9.    GPS based solid waste truck tracking, fleet/personnel planning.

10. Health care Infrastructure, capabilities and patient management. 

The solutions to these use cases are typically capital intensive and also will not be easy to deploy and manage as they will be mega IoT applications that too deployed in public places. 

Build the Next: Once the basics are fixed, there will be good amount of data in the Smart City platform, which will offer tremendous possibilities to create innovative applications like the ones mentioned below without additional capital expenditure and field deployments.

1.    Show Bus occupancy with ETA to the commuters to plan their journey better.

2.    Multimodal transport (Metro, Bus, Taxi, E-Bikes) application. 

3.    Efficient fleet planning for Public transport, Solid waste pick up.

4.    Flood prediction and warning using Rain, Water level, River flow datasets.

5.    Automated Green corridor for emergency vehicles.

6.    Revenue leakage detection using building type, trade license, utility bills data.

Return On Investments (ROI): It will be worth the investment for these solutions as it will pay off in multiple forms.

1.    15-20% cost savings through the automation, reduced revenue leakage.

2.    Additional revenue from the increased usage of services by citizens.

3.    Benefits from less road accidents, lower air pollution, reduced commute time. and healthier and happier citizens

Unlike other services, in the case of Citizen Security, there are very less opportunities to generate revenues through optimisations or increased usage and hence it is recommended to explore the following.

1.    Use the video cameras for traffic violations, parking, public assets monitoring etc for the security surveillance too with no/little additional cost.

2.    Since the smart phone usage is rapidly growing, making use of the citizen’s phones for the video, panic support and as a communication channel during emergency assistance.

Next steps: It is important the cities plan and implement the use cases to Fix the Basics first, envisaging the extensions and interfaces to Build the Next on it. The installed hardware and software to Fix the Basics need to be future proof, scalable and open for the ecosystem players to Build the Next on the existing installations. Ofcourse it should be attempted to club the requirements for both the phases wherever possible and manageable.

This is the time, the central and state governments, consulting organisations, technology providers and system integrators come together, prioritize the requirements, investments and also build and deploy the solutions to realize it. Looks like it is a great opportunity for all to participate and contribute in this nation building exercise.  

Your thoughts and comments are most welcome!