How Cisco Kinetic is helping cities become “Smart Cities”

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For decades, cities have relied on citizens calling and alerting them to road conditions, traffic light malfunctions and water leakages. Unfortunately, with an increasing population, these methods are no longer effective and cities need to have a better system in place. In today’s era, most cities have started to utilize technology to stay on top of potential issues.

Smart Cities allows cities to extract more data that can enhance traffic and safety, reduce pollution, improve the lives of citizens and create new revenue streams. Smart Cities also allow municipalities to gather real-time information. For example, traffic engineers can now count traffic while also monitoring various traffic directions. This allows them to look for patterns on how variables such as weather can affect traffic behavior.

Smart Cities are also able to receive information on crowds including the number of people, their transportation mode and the time of day, month or week they are traveling. With this information, cities can determine when and where to light up streets and sidewalks to enhance security.

One of the challenges facing Smart Cities is “Siloed Operations”. Most cities operate multiple departments, each of them with their own objectives. The problem is they don’t always share data or results with one another. One example we’ve seen involved a traffic camera located directly next to a police camera. Both cameras were on the same pole and looking at the same spot. As a result, the city had two cameras doing the same job. Cisco Kinetic for Cities is a digital platform that can allow different municipal departments to collect data from different sources such as cameras, sensors, valves, and lights and transport the data to an analysis and control application. Kinetic is designed to share and obtain information from other sources, leading to better and more innovative ways to respond to citizen’s needs. It provides a better and more cost-efficient alternative to today’s fragmented process.

Kinetic has also made it possible to share pollution data points from environmental systems with traffic systems. With this information, cities can change traffic patterns to limit vehicles in a specific zone, which as a result, will bring pollution levels down while sending an alert to citizens to avoid walking nearby. Paris, Nice, Jaipur and Kansas City are just some of the many cities using Cisco Solutions such as kinetic to create better living conditions for citizens while optimizing their resources.

Together we can help cities assemble the best digital platform to transform the way we live, work and play. Click here to learn more about how Cisco Kinetic for Cities is paving the way for cities to become more intelligent.