Kazimierz Dolny is to become the first smart city in Poland, based on a contract signed by the CEO of T-Mobile Poland Andreas Maierhofer and the mayor of the city, Andrzej Pisula. According to Maierhofer, in 2019, T-Mobile will offer twelve smart city services, for which it will conduct nearly 700 installations.
Poland, More Than Tourists
Kazimierz Dolny is an attractive travel destination with only 4,000 inhabitants, but has one million visitors a year. The small town is in central eastern Poland, in Pulawy County, Lublin Voivodeship. For T-Mobile it is a great place to have the first smart city implementation. It is a medieval town with a small population and a large source of its income is tourism. For Kazimierz Dolny, it is an opportunity for the residents to benefit from digital services. The smart city project will also allow for integration with the municipal smart city application.
Among the services in the agreement are: smart street lighting, bus stops and benches, parking with more than 500 installations; city monitoring making use of 40 street cameras; electric vehicles, including more than 60 city bikes and other vehicles and three charging stations; public WiFi with 40 hotspots; and air quality monitoring with two stations.
The municipal smart city application features an administrative panel for local authorities; integrated statistical data for various operations; and access to local tourist attractions. Behind the information gathering, T-Mobile will carry Big Data analysis to help make decisions for the city’s promotional activities and areas of investment.
T-Mobile Smart City Offer
In 2017, T-Mobile launched smart city pilot projects in Nysa and Pionki, two other Polish cities. The tests centered around smart city lighting system, which introduced smart control of lighting with LED. This aimed to lower costs by 35% to 40%. The city posts were also used for installing additional sensors, surveillance cameras, WiFi hotspots as well as power points for advertising media and charging stations for EVs.
The successful testing of smart city components in 2017, led to T-Mobile Poland putting smart city installations on a permanent offering. The smart city offered plenty of benefits to cities. Video detection had an intelligent image analysis system which increase the threat detectability to 95% effectiveness. The LED lighting system not only lowered operating costs, it also allowed for remote control of each post and lantern with an embedded system of failure notification. The lighting also automatically adjusts intensity according to weather and traffic conditions.
The smart air quality monitoring is important for Poland due the high concentration of pollutants. It does not only measures air quality, it can also diagnose the cause of the smog in various parts of the city. The measuring stations can measure different parameters including PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 particulates, as well as the presence of other pollutants like sulphates and nitrates, and measure ozone levels.
WiFi hotspots are part of the T-Mobile offer to display messages on the login screen. Besides local events, companies and local shops can also buy advertisement which contributes to the city revenue. The WiFi network can also be used in conjunction with a modern passenger information system for buses and trams.
Smart Cities Worldwide
There have been several initiatives to transform urban centers to smart cities. The most famous and one of the biggest is Quayside, an 800-acre property in Toronto. Leading the development is Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet company. The initial study will cost $50 million with the total cost at around $1 billion.
In the United States, the Smart City Challenge has been a yearly event since 2015. In 2017, this lead to the introduction of R.H. 4151, also called the “Smart Technology for Resilient, Efficient, Economic and Reliable Transportation in Cities and Communities Act” sponsored by Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (R-VA) and Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty (D-CT).
