Nowadays, we are talking about not only smart phones, but also smart home appliances, smart homes, even smart cities and smart transportation that is a part of it.
When it comes to smart cities, scenes from science fiction movies come to life in the eyes of many of us. Although there is a high degree of information technology integration among the main features of the smart city, smart cities are not far from today. Because smart cities are not built from scratch, the cities we live in are transformed into smart ones with smart city applications.
Smart city applications have been created with the vision of sustainability to make city life more comfortable, and while doing this, they benefit from technology, especially IoT, ie the internet of things.
Fast Developing Intelligent Transportation with IoT
Internet of Things, at the simplest level, means that any object can be connected to the internet directly or indirectly. Thanks to IoT, traditional products and services continue to transform and change and become smarter. As an example, we can give the transformation of mobile phones, which previously only had speech and sms features, into today's smartphones by connecting to the internet. Thanks to IoT, smartphones have gone far beyond what conventional mobile phones can do and become “smart”. IoT also enables smart devices to communicate with each other, which means it can send and receive information and analyze the data collected to make meaningful and plausible decisions.
One of the areas that benefit the most from IoT technology is smart transportation systems. It is planned to solve transportation and traffic, which has become a bigger problem as the number of people living in cities increases, with smart transportation systems. Intelligent transport is accepted as a general term covering vehicle data, route optimization, parking, traffic management, street lights, accident prevention / detection, road anomalies and infrastructure applications. Security, environmental friendliness, efficiency and effectiveness and better quality of life are among the values promised by smart transportation systems. In other words, thanks to intelligent transportation systems, which are systems that include monitoring, measurement, analysis and control with versatile data exchange between user-vehicle-infrastructure-passenger, travel time decreases, traffic safety increases, optimum use of existing road capacities, increased mobility and energy efficiency contributes to the economy and the damage to the environment is reduced. Thanks to smart transportation systems, which is an integrated system that includes communication, control, electronics and vehicle detection technologies, people and administrations who can follow the traffic density in cities can determine alternative routes.
Smart Parking
Uber, Lyft, Moovit, Martı, etc. are examples of smart transportation applications. One of the best examples is finding suitable parking spaces based on instant data. The purpose of smart parking applications is to improve the parking experience and manage the parking lot in the most efficient way even in places with limited parking capacity. Searching for parking spaces can cause a waste of time and fuel as well as an increase in drivers' carbon footprint and traffic congestion. However, all these problems will be easily solved with IoT solutions and smart parking applications using mobile payment technology. Smart parking systems that direct the drivers to the most suitable parking spaces of the parking lots in the city process the data based on location, deliver them to users and also offer mobile payment services. Thus, it improves users 'parking experience, fundamentally changes users' parking habits and makes the city smarter.
Although the main features that make a city a smart city are problem-solving ability and using technology to solve problems, technology alone is not enough to call a city smart. City residents should try applications, participate in applications, and test applications. After all, it is the people who live in that city that make a city smart.