How Big Data Is Creating Smarter Cities

Cities are becoming highly populated and more urbanised. More people are living closer together and changing climate trends are providing more threats to citizens. Congested roads, bottlenecks and the efficiency of public services are all issues that are of growing concern for modern cities.

Cities are having to adapt to these trends. They have to do this quicker than ever. Increasingly those responsible for managing how cities are run and controlled are looking towards big data to help solve these problems.

With the increased digitisation of cities, connected devices, sensors and improved ability to capture and analyse data it is becoming easier tounderstand and predictthe trends that are affecting the average citizen’s life.

Big data is helping to make traffic jams a thing of the past. By identifying patterns in congestion and using these to assist transport authorities is providing intelligent ways to monitor and manage transport in large cities.

Smart navigation systems have the potential to continuously monitor the roads and can transport this data to a central control centre. This helps to provide real-time information on accidents, traffic jams or even emergency services and their movements.

This data can be used to redirect routes in real-time. It can be broadcast live to people’s devices to help understand quickly what is happening around citizens and which areas are better to avoid.

Plotting data around accidents can help to identify trends and implement new controls to minimise the number of accidents in a given location.

Movement data can help identify where public transport is overly strained and where new routes can be implemented to reduce congestion. Smarter public transport will run on real-time data, and could potentially be automated.

Data is a powerful resource to identify parking loggerheads in real-time and can help to redirect traffic to different areas.

Big data analysis can determine the most likely caused by crime and can visualize this in different areas of cities.

Data enabled cities make it easier for crime-fighting initiatives. Data is utilized to identify high-crime areas. Being smarter in this area allows cities to be better at predicting and preventing crime before it actually happens.

This allows emergency services to redistribute patrols accordingly in order to address areas where crime is more likely to occur at any given time.

Multiple data sets can combine to help manage city crises, such as widespread city disasters or natural disasters. By combining sensor data on weather patterns and combining this with population movement and trends cities can be smarter and more effective at dealing with disasters.

Big data is valuable at different stages of this process – from prediction and prevention, mitigation, response and recovery.