Your Municipal Budget – The Problem and a Solution
As a city leader, you’re constantly finding ways to stretch your municipal budget, hoping to improve efficiency while keeping costs low. With the ongoing rise of smart city technology, more and more forward-thinking local leaders are looking to this valuable tool set to help them achieve their budget and performance goals.
From energy efficiency and waste management to predictive maintenance and parking management, smart city technology offers a whole host of opportunities to help you save money and allocate resources more effectively.
With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at three smart city solutions that can help you streamline processes and cut costs for your municipal budget while also providing better services to your citizens.
Predictive Maintenance
One of the best bang-for-your-buck initiatives in the smart city space is to take basic pieces of city infrastructure, like street or traffic lights, and make them “smart.”
Let’s look at street lights as an example. Swapping out old light fixtures with LED bulbs is an immediate way to start saving money and becoming more energy efficient, but imagine placing light controls and sensors on the street lights themselves. With the ability to dim, lighten, or completely turn off lights based on location and time of day can lead to even greater energy savings. Additionally, the sensors could proactively monitor when the lights may fail, allowing them to be replaced without citizens ever experiencing a darkened route, leading to a better sense of public safety.
Waste Management
From labor, equipment and day-to-day operations, trash and recycling collection is a considerable cost for cities of any size, and the current state of affairs is anything but ideal. If the wheels of a garbage truck are turning, money is burning, oftentimes without any guarantee that there is actually trash in need of collecting.
With smart city technology, city leaders can install sensors inside public trash cans that notify the city, proactively, of when they’re full and need a pickup. With these sensors in place, waste management teams can optimize their route to prioritize the locations that actually need attention, saving time and money that can now be spent elsewhere – and that’s not even mentioning the reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Smarter Parking
Replacing old coin-operated meters with smarter solutions may be a costly proposition, but the benefits are meaningful and long-lasting. Cities across the country have upgraded their street parking technology and found it resulted in higher revenue, lower labor costs (thanks to parking staff no longer having to manually collect coins from individual meters), better data on traffic patterns, and most importantly, a better overall experience for citizens.
Wrapping Up on Smart Cities and Your Municipal Budget
Smart city technology is a valuable tool for any city leader looking to make the most of their municipal budget. The key to a truly successful smart city rollout is to have a clear, long term vision in mind and the right partners to help you along the way.
Hylan offers full-service turnkey communications solutions and electrical infrastructure design and construction services for wireline, wireless and smart city municipal services. Our team’s decades of experience in both wireless and fiberless technologies makes us the ideal partner for building a strong foundational infrastructure to support your city’s needs today, tomorrow, and beyond.