We all know well how much life has changed in million-plus cities in recent years in terms of infrastructure. Our team at LANIT-Integration works a lot on smart city projects. In this post, we would like to briefly describe what changes have taken place in the capital in terms of building a smart city, and compare the largest metropolis in Russia, Moscow, with other major cities in the world, where smart technologies are being implemented just as quickly, and sometimes even faster.
Smart cities are on the rise. Modern services appear both in specially designed cities, such as Masdar (the city of the future without cars) or the eco-technological Tianjin created by China and Singapore, and in the largest metropolitan areas, for example, in Moscow ( puts it on a par with Singapore, Hong Kong and New York). According to analysts, smart city services will bring about $2020 billion by 400. , which can be safely called an additional incentive for the development of infrastructure in modern megacities.
But let's get back to our capital (after all, the majority of Russians have visited Moscow, unlike New York or Mexico City). Over the past 15 years, Moscow has seen many new, "smart" sides, and it successfully competes with many world capitals in terms of the level of penetration of modern technologies. But at the same time, hot water can be turned off in Moscow for 10 days.
However, Moscow is a far cry from cities like Tokyo or Delhi in terms of population, and some of the amazing smart technology that many other cities around the world already have hasn't reached us yet. So, with a high general Moscow lags behind Toronto in the development of virtual infrastructure, Tokyo in equipping smart homes, Sydney in the digitalization of tourism, and New York in terms of the level of development of the digital economy. But a smart city is not even a state, but a vector of development. The most interesting are real examples of the implementation of smart technologies in the leading cities in the ratings.
Transport
Transport infrastructure is one of the most difficult stages in the implementation of the smart city concept. The congestion of roads and highways forces the metropolis to provide as many opportunities as possible for the movement of people, as well as to create services that would help plan trips and, of course, pay for them.
For example, in Singapore, where owning a car is generally quite expensive, for those who decide to use personal transport, the most comfortable conditions are created. To do this, smart traffic lights constantly analyze traffic flows and change the green signal time for different directions depending on the density of the traffic flow. Shanghai uses smart parking lots with geomagnetic sensors that register the number of cars left and allow you to find free spaces through a mobile application.
. In Singapore, most of the funds are allocated to public safety projects.
For comparison, several new directions are being developed in Moscow at once to solve the transport problem. So, today the Moscow car sharing market is . As for eco-friendly cycling, the capital of Russia still ranks 11th in the world, but this is already an achievement, because back in 2010 there were no conditions for cyclists in our capital. Between 2011 and 2018, the total length of cycle lanes increased ninefold, and implies further expansion.
To avoid the temptation to permanently park, certain areas in London, Tokyo, SΓ£o Paulo and Mexico City have introduced maximum city center parking times that cannot be exceeded. In Moscow, the problem of traffic jams in the central part of the city was solved in 2013 with the help of the Moscow parking space, and at the same time, the first car sharing service, Anytime, appeared. The explosive growth of carsharing in Moscow occurred in the fall of 2015, when the Moscow Carsharing project was launched. Car rental companies were able to purchase preferential parking permits in the capital. in the fall of 2018, one carsharing car accounted for 1082 Muscovites with a further plan of the authorities to reach a ratio of 1 to 500 residents. However, not everything turns out to be so rosy in reality. The new Street Falcon parking time control systems periodically issue erroneous fines to cars, , and metropolitan car sharing services sometimes offer tenants .
But there is also good news,, Moscow ranks second in terms of the rate of commissioning of the road network after Beijing and continues to build roads. And the Seoul authorities, in addition to building new highways, also decided to introduce toll roads within the city so that drivers can quickly get to the right point, paying the fare according to the distance.
Communication and communication
According to , in 2018 the world leader in the number of free Wi-Fi hotspots is Singapore. More than 20 wireless network access zones have been deployed in this city-country. In second place is Seoul with 000 hotspots, and third place went to Moscow, which has 8678 hotspots installed, has the highest mobile data speeds, and the number of Wi-Fi hotspots is constantly growing.
PWC analysts believe that in 2018 our capital overtook even New York, London, Tokyo in terms of the number of free Wi-Fi zones and entered the top three world leaders, as close as possible to Seoul, which ranks second in the world.
Moreover, the developed Wi-Fi infrastructure in transport helps not only city residents, but also tourists. So, fast and free wireless Internet in the subway and on aeroexpress as well as the availability of Wi-Fi in parks, stadiums and public spaces.
The experience of other cities in organizing the Internet access infrastructure is also interesting. For example, in Mexico City, a project has been underway for a long time, within the framework of which a Wi-Fi zone is being built by ... Google. The involvement of a commercial company allowed to significantly increase the increase in the number of access zones, for the creation of which the government simply did not have the funds.
. Mexico City is among the cities with over 30 percent smart adoption rates (McKinsey).
Communication with the government
Mobility is definitely a trend for today's smart cities, and so the number and quality of apps that anyone can use plays a big role. So, , among the leaders in the pace of improving communications between the government and citizens are New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the Americas, Seoul, Singapore and Shenzhen in Asia, and London and Moscow in Europe.
The most famous mobile service in Moscow can be considered the Active Citizen application, which is an electronic platform for holding referendums in an interactive form. Through the "Active Citizen" all the most important issues of the development of the city and its individual districts are resolved.
The project "Our City" has become a kind of addition to the "Active Citizen" and is a book of complaints - a way to contact the city's officials and get an answer. All these services work through a mobile application.
With the help of Active Citizen, the authorities collect 200-300 thousand opinions on each important issue, and Our City processes about 25 thousand complaints every week, each of which takes an average of four days to resolve. The operation of these services has become the reason for use a similar digitalization approach in the regions.
Security and video surveillance
By increasing the speed of networks, the video surveillance system is developing all over the world, and not only the number of cameras is growing, but also the quality of work of analytical centers, mainly due to face recognition technologies. The cameras are used by the police and city services, and more recently also by bailiffs.
At the beginning of March, 2019 to the uniform data storage and processing center of Moscow in which face recognition technologies are already implemented, . 100 video surveillance points are located at the entrances, 20 were located in the yards and in the adjoining territories. The rest are on the streets and in subway passages.
But our city has something to strive for. For example, Beijing (pop. 22 million) has nearly 500 cameras, while London (pop. 9 million) has almost XNUMX cameras. to 400 thousand. Now, thanks to surveillance cameras with face recognition, the Moscow police . This is due to the fact that in the capital since 2017 , which helps to detect terrorists and criminals in the subway. It allows you to recognize faces with an accuracy of up to 80% in a database of up to 500 million images, and if we are talking about searching for a small number of people (i.e., in a database of up to 1000 images), the result will be guaranteed at 97%. The system can find and compare photos from a camera with samples of a billion faces in just 0,5 seconds, and therefore, at the end of February 2019, a project was also launched in the capital to detect wanted debtors in the stream, in particular, evading alimony payments.
The development of artificial intelligence algorithms is expected to improve the safety of cities. For example, scientists from universities in India and the UK , which quite successfully recognizes people even with partially closed faces. According to the test results, the machine managed to recognize 67% of people who put on a scarf over their face, put on a beard or somehow changed their appearance.
Modern recognition algorithms provide special opportunities for analyzing the situation on the streets. For example, in China for several years in public places. The system determines gender and age, color and type of clothing, and also gives the characteristics of the vehicle. All these data allow for in-depth analysis and record, for example, an atypically large concentration of young males in black clothes.
. Facial recognition technologies help find missing children or the elderly. Residents in China can use face scanning to shop, make payments, or enter buildings.
Last year, an interesting initiative to expand the scope of video surveillance technologies was launched . Police officers will have real-time access from their smartphone or desktop to more than 30 thousand cameras and video data analytics installed in the city. At this time, the Moscow police augmented reality glasses. The advantage of this technology compared to working on smartphones is that the officer does not need to consult his device to understand where a potential criminal or intruder is. Augmented reality glasses combine the view of the real world with additional graphics, so the policeman will simply see how the system singles out one or more people from the crowd.
. In Chicago, high-definition cameras are built into streetlights and used to provide security in crowded places.
To be continued ...
In Moscow, we see an example of a combination of different approaches to organizing a smart city. In the next article, we will talk about the development of payment infrastructure, healthcare services, as well as city services, parcel terminals, healthcare and education. All these elements of a smart city are under active development and hide many interesting details.
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Source: habr.com