The General Mayor of Bucharest, Nicusor Dan, estimated on Wednesday that a complete system for traffic management, which would include smart traffic lights and correlations with public transport, could be done in two years, according to AGERPRES.
"A new European financial exercise is starting and there is will from the EU and the will of the national authority and the will of the local authority to collaborate for intelligent solutions. Bucharest needs a smart solution which, and this is a promise, we will accomplish very soon, in two years, I estimate, starting from this moment, for what means intelligent traffic lights, meaning a complete traffic management system, correlated with public transport. Bucharest, obviously, needs a massive digitization of the entire public administration. And, once more, here we have European money that's available to us. Bucharest needs a solution to one of the main issues it has at this time - the heating system. And, again, there is will and money," said the mayor, at the "From City to Smart City" conference.
Nicusor Dan added that an element that's necessary to implement the concept of smart city, beyond new technologies, is the transparency of administration, which can be ensured by political will.
According to him, presently, Bucharest doesn't have an inventory of properties, records that are necessary to efficiently manage the city.
The new general mayor emphasized the necessity of an urban database, a domain in which Bucharest does not fare well.
"It's been seven-eight years since the last development strategy for Bucharest was made, we had a very interesting team of experts, including Romanians and international experts that are working in institutions abroad, and they said that the big limitation of this strategy and, especially, its limiting in what regards the Bucharest metropolitan area comes from the fact that we didn't have data to work on. I convey to you my will to start to collect all this urban data," Nicusor Dan explained.
He mentioned that the data he is referring to is data regarding mobility, mentioning that the routes of the public transportation system in Bucharest have not been modified since the '80's, being just adjusted, as well as for the utilities networks, for which there is no complete data.