As months go by, the La Guagua live monitoring application of urban transport collects relevant data on the mobility of people that could be useful to interpret the reality of the territory from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes sectors such as health, physical planning, or demography.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- While the number of users continues to grow, there are already more than 11 thousand compared to the half thousand registered in November; as well as the total of its uses per month, more than 55 thousand in January, La Guagua is not only providing valid additional information to identify the areas of the city of Las Tunas that concentrate people on a daily basis, said Wílliam Amed Tamayo Guevara, director of Technology of the Passenger and General Cargo Transportation Company (CARDINAL).
Also, he said, "it allows to know more precisely places and times in which people require urban transport service." Those details, he clarified, are obtained with the informed consent of the users, included in the privacy policy and through other instruments present in the App such as surveys.
Before, he exemplified, traditional studies indicated in a general way what the use of urban transport was like. Now, he stressed, they can estimate demand peaks in previously defined periods, always based on indicative estimates that users on 70 percent of the occasions enter the application about an hour before they plan to use CARDINAL buses.
While providing a view on the characteristics of a portion of the potential passengers of the buses operated by CARDINAL in the largest city of Las Tunas, the App also enabled the company's technicians to identify crowded areas of the city that until now were not classified as such. This is the case of the bus stop near to the warehouses of the Wholesale Trade Company.
Amed Tamayo agreed that knowing that this urban space, along with other more notorious such as the urban transport stops located in the downtown, the Buena Vista Tank or La Caldosa, are points of the confluence of many inhabitants of this territory, would be of particular interest to Public Health specialists when planning sanitation or epidemiological surveillance actions. The same, the expert agreed, could be done by his colleagues who work in other areas of science such as physical planning or demography.
In fact, he affirmed, CARDINAL hopes to strengthen its working ties with the Higher Education centers in the territory in order to make more efficient and articulated use of this information that it is already obtaining. Everything, he concluded, to put it at the service of the sustainable development of the province.
