The smart County—in a box

It’s all just a theory at this point. But you can join a few dots and a picture begins to emerge.

You start with the County commissioners’ proposal to sell off our libraries, museums and town halls. Obviously, they are trying to find that big fix that will shake up Shire Hall and still keep our taxes from rising. But what is it?

You then add the misspelling of the briefly erected but justifiably famous “Welligton” sign—a companion to the “Rose Hall” and “Rosehall” signs still standing at opposite ends of that village—and you wonder if municipal officials are deliberately seeking to erode our confidence in the printed word. But why?

Then throw into the mix the fact that the County has now decided to add a second position to beef up the operation of the geographic information system it decided to acquire in 2009 because, well, it would be kind of neat to have. What was the point in that manoeuvre?

I had an inkling what the answer might be when I came across a New York Times article that described how the city of Rio de Janeiro (which is to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics) has installed a computer controlled city management system developed by IBM that “looks straight out of NASA.”

The article describes how “city employees in white jumpsuits (stand) in front of a giant wall of screens…video streams in from subway stations and major intersections… a weather program predicts rainfall across the city… a map glows with the locations of car accidents, power failures and other problems.” The program spots trends and patterns immediately, and therefore allows better co-ordination. For example, during the annual carnival, 425 mobile samba bands perform at some 350 sites over four weekends, and traffic has to be rerouted efficiently to avoid chaos.

Not surprisingly, IBM has built on its Rio project and bundled it into a program that offers other municipalities the “smart city in a box” technology.

Rio’s mayor justifies the use of the system by saying that the city is stuck doing “too many things at once, all necessary.” Now that’s the sort of language that I’ve heard bouncing around the County in the last few budget weeks. So put it all together. Don’t you think it’s just plausible that our County manager has got a ‘smart County in a box’ computer project waiting in the wings, for which the geographical information system is just a stalking horse?

The attraction is obvious. Such a system, when used properly, could quickly spot the traffic logjams flowing in and out of the bluegrass festival at Salmon Point, while at the same time it checked on lineups at the LCBO in Picton. It could pinpoint every pothole in Cressy, and dispatch a fire truck to rescue a cat stuck in a tree up in Northport. In short, it could manage the County’s logistics in real time, and potentially save us a bundle. Throw in an antique tractor show in Ameliasburgh and a demonstration against wind turbines at Ostrander Point taking place at the same time, and you‘re still not touching the edges of the system’s capacity. There’s probably room enough to play Fruit Ninjas on it as well.

Sure, the system might be expensive, but that very expense might force the County to make some of the hard choices it professes to have difficulty making. Admittedly, purchase of the system would probably require the County commissioners themselves to be sold off, and see County staff stripped right down to the County administrator, a bunch of computer geeks (dressed in snazzy white jumpsuits) and some people who drive trucks (not to plough snow, but to get cats out of trees and to put up, take down, and re-erect road signs). But would that be such a bad thing? What better way to challenge the people of the County to experience the thrill involved in paying low taxes and relying on volunteers to fill the gaps? Surely this is just the sort of bold initiative we’re paying our new County administrator to come up with.

Anyone want to test the system and start a samba band? A mobile one? Anyone want to start a samba band?

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.