Orlando will continue to face this trend of rapid growth in population, size and opportunity. People want to live in Orlando, which is good for job growth, innovation and making our city a “cooler” place to call home.
However, as a City it’s our responsibility to plan for and sustain this positive growth by investing in and maintaining our infrastructure to work smarter and improve our quality of life while reducing our environmental impact.
Urbanization and climate change are beginning to spur dramatic changes in local government. The advancement in digital technologies in a variety of fields are disrupting our traditional operations and becoming increasingly important in order to ensure that we maintain our competitiveness and our city continues to be a great place to live, work, learn and play.
Like many cities, Orlando is beginning to explore innovative and smarter solutions to address key social and environmental challenges of our lifetime, such as ways to cut carbon emissions, improve efficiency in infrastructure and buildings, maintain our water quality, stimulate a market shift toward cleaner energy and transition to a more open and environmentally-friendly public transportation system.
As a result, we launched an exciting new initiative called Smart ORL, a comprehensive smart cities initiative that will combine our work across all departments city-wide and explore ways to use digital technologies to improve our city operations, save money and make the City Beautiful a more livable, more workable and more sustainable city for years to come.
As part of this effort, we’re excited to partner with Siemens to utilize their interactive and comprehensive City Performance Tool (CyPT) to help us identify innovative technologies to help us reach those goals. Through CyPT, we will lean on the technical expertise and global experience of Siemens to estimate the long-term economic and environmental impacts of more than 70 types of building, energy and transportation technologies.
Imagine how cities will be transformed when we begin to setup the technology infrastructure to deploy solutions similar to apps on a smartphone that will improve our lives. These solutions include quicker response systems for our police and fire departments, or traffic analytics to improve your commute, and real-time parking information.
Orlando joins Austin, Indianapolis, Miami and Philadelphia, as one of five cities that will lead the nation in the pursuit of the use of technology to improve our community and create a comprehensive Smart City roadmap.
Stay tuned for more exciting updates about Smart ORL and the City Performance Tool results on our website.
– Buddy Dyer, Mayor
