LTA, MSO win global tech award
Screenshot of the Municipal Services Office website.
SINGAPORE — The Land Transport Authority (LTA) and the Municipal Services Office (MSO) have received an international award for their use of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to improve the delivery of Singapore’s public services.
Organised by global mapping software firm Esri, yesterday’s (July 22) annual Esri User Conference in San Diego, California saw LTA and MSO each pick up a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award, the firm said in a press release today. The agencies were picked from more than 400,000 organisations worldwide.
LTA won the award for its data analytics programme called Planning for Land Transport Network (Planet). The system uses GIS technology to help the agency’s planners understand commuter patterns better and hence fine-tune transport policy.
An LTA spokesperson said the Planet system allowed planners to pinpoint hotspots of passenger-crowding on public buses during the peak hours and make live adjustments in bus deployment to bring about a noticeable decrease in crowded bus services and average waiting times.
Chief executive officer of Esri Singapore Thomas Pramotedham had noted that LTA’s use of GIS in their data analytics assisted them to achieve a 60 per cent reduction in persistently-crowded bus services. “It also helped them achieve a reduction in average waiting time by three to seven minutes despite an annual increase in average daily bus ridership of 100,000.”
The same Planet system also won an award last year at the National Infocomm Awards under the category of Most Innovative Use of Infocomm Technology (Public Sector) for their use of data analytics to gain deeper insights on travelling patterns and commuter demands.
Group director for innovation and infocomm technology Rosina Howe received the award on behalf of LTA and said: “GIS tools have revolutionised our capabilities to plan transport routes more efficiently, identify gaps quickly and allow us to work with our bus operators to deploy our resources in a much more efficient manner. These improvements ultimately translate into a better public transport journey experience for our commuters.”
MSO’s integrated municipal feedback management system, OneService @SG (OSSG), also walked away with an award. The system uses GIS technology to facilitate seamless case referrals between agencies such as the Housing and Development Board (HDB), the National Environment Agency (NEA), the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and others.
The OSSG app is a one-stop location for all residents to feedback or report on municipal matters.
For example, residents may not always be aware of which relevant agency to call when reporting an issue. The app allows users to snap a picture, geo-tag its location and it will direct it to the relevant agency to look into the matter as the goe-tagging pinpoints the exact location of the problem.
As such, by linking MSO and its partner agencies, MSO has oversight of all municipal feedback cases regardless of where the feedback was first received and helps to ensure proper case closure.
“Their work exemplifies how government agencies around the world are using GIS to extend the impact of their work in their respective departments, organisations, and citizens at large,” added Mr Pramotedham.
