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Cape deploys GIS for transport planning

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 31 Aug 2011

Local IT solutions company, Aspire Solutions, is working with the City of Cape Town to develop a geographic information system (GIS) to support the municipality in its public transport planning.

The project, now in its first year, is part of a three-year contract with the City of Cape Town, according to Mike Steyn, director of Aspire Solutions.

“The system development side will be finished within the next six months to a year, but the contract, in terms of data collection, will continue for another two years.”

According to Steyn, the project involves computer units installed in city buses, statistics of which are then sent to a server. Information is collected from taxis and public transport and collated into a GIS system.

Steyn says the system aims to monitor the number of buses, passengers, bus routes, and the busiest areas. “There is a legislative requirement for the city to report on a regular basis on the usage and modes of transportation,” he adds.

According to Steyn, government has traditionally been one of the biggest clients to use GIS for spatial planning in cities, asset identification, and infrastructure building.

However, he says similar technology is being used by businesses to make decisions.

“What we are seeing now is that there is a huge demand for spatial data collection, and with huge amounts of data, businesses are also using it to solve business problems. Private companies are embracing it and this is filtering down to medium companies. GIS is being driven by mainstream mapping technologies.”

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