The word 'app' has now entered our daily lexicon. Almost every day we look for and download (if the memory of our devices allow us) new apps to make our lives easier and simplify our every gesture. Many, to tell the truth, are the almost useless apps on our phone or those that last only because they are fashionable. Remember the Ruzzle craze a couple of years ago? But among these apps that are not very useful, heavy, seduced and abandoned within a few weeks, there are many others, however, which can really help us and which we cannot do without now.
And these days, among other things, developers, experts and enthusiasts of the world of apps from all over Italy and beyond meet in Todi for four days dedicated to the digital world and that of apps entitled Todi Appy Days. And apps of all kinds will certainly pop up: for fitness, for travel, for music, for mobility in the city and beyond. Among other things, fans of this new frontier can also create your own personal app, to then also be disseminated in digital stores, without even knowing a code of the programming language. As in the case of the GoodBarber web platform which allows everyone to create an app in an easy and highly customizable way.
Surely, for those who live in the city then a problem of no small importance is that of traffic, in addition to that of the eternal challenge to parcheggio. In Rome every year a motorist loses 93 hours of his life in a traffic jam. Romans lose 24 minutes in traffic jams for every hour they drive. Knowing which roads are less busy to avoid traffic thus becomes the new challenge for all medium and large Italian cities.
And obviously also on this subject here is theright app to struggle between the exhaust fumes and the annoying car horns. But this app was not developed in Rome by those who, exhausted by the exhausting hit and miss walking on the Tiburtina, decided to dive into the world of programming languages for mobile devices, nor by a startup in Milan to solve once and for all the problems of circulation on the ring road. The idea and creation of the right app to know all the traffic news in real time comes from Puglia and precisely from Bari.
The app is called InfoSmartCity and was developed within the Living Lab Project SOWING promoted by the Puglia Region. The SEMINA project (Evolved systems for intelligent mobility in agile urban networks) was born in an attempt to better manage sustainable mobility in the urban area for the Municipality of Bari. But this app does not only offer traffic information in real time. In fact, with the app you can immediately know the availability of parking spaces in the Park&Ride areas, waiting times at the bus stop, special parking spaces for the disabled, pregnant women, the geolocation of public offices and pharmacies with the relative timetables of opening and closing. Furthermore, the SEMINA project allows the city administration to analyze the dynamics of urban mobility and the police forces to monitor the traffic level in real time and identify any critical cases. Among other things, thanks to the SEMINA project, the Municipality of Bari won the Smart Communities Award for sustainable urban mobility at Smau 2014.
