Benidorm will tender an exclusive contract for mobility control that will include ‘smart’ solutions

Benidorm City Council will tender an exclusive contract for control of mobility and traffic light network that will include 'smart' solutions aimed at “improving mobility management by making it more sustainable, more effective and more operational for citizens that at any moment you can know the state of the traffic in the whole city and, therefore, knowing in which streets there may be a traffic jam or where there are parking spaces available ”, as explained by the councilor of the area, José Ramón González de Zárate. In addition, "internally, it will also allow the City Council to know what the flow of daily vehicles and traffic is in the city, something key to be able to make future decisions about design or changes in mobility."

De Zárate explained that "until now the management of the traffic light network was part of a contract that also included street lighting." However, “based on the new Public Sector Contract Law we have chosen to separate the lighting from the management of mobility and traffic light network, generating two different and more powerful contracts with the inclusion of smart solutions linked to the 'smart city ​​'”.

The councillor said that "the municipal technicians have exposed to the members of the Municipal Corporation in the Information Commission the details of this contract, called 'Maintenance of Mobility', which is to be tendered for a period of 10 years and that provides for an investment annual of one million euros ”.

This new contract includes installing traffic control cameras - which will include license plate readers - in all the entrances and exits of the city, which will be added to those already installed and those that operate in the restricted access areas, and which will be monitored in a Control Center located in the 'Smart Office' of the City Council. At that Control Center, the traffic light network will also be managed, which will have a system in place that will make it possible to regulate the passing sequences based on traffic at all times.

The data obtained in the Control Center will allow to know the traffic status in real time and transfer it to the citizens through “a mobile application and a web portal”.

The contract also provides for monitoring the parking of the blue zone, the residents' zone, the deterrent parking lots, the loading and unloading areas, the Persons with Reduced Mobility (PMR), and the charging points for electric vehicles.

De Zárate stressed that “by monitoring this parking lot we can inform the public where there are free places to go directly to these points; as with the rest of the ‘smart’ solutions, we can transfer the public transport situation, or which are the fastest, most direct and / or decongested routes ”. The latter, he stressed, will make “the displacements are shorter and, therefore, CO2 emissions are reduced and air quality is improved, which can also be measured with the technology implemented under this contract” .