The City of Florence is one of the most challenging cities in the world for managing traffic; it has a very dense urban structure, with narrow roads, no beltway, 400,000 daily commuters, plus 300,000 tourists at peak times. Florence manages more than 12,000 traffic control plans per year, originating from utility, scaffolding, moving and public event permits. Coordination of all temporary road encroachments is very critical. Before GEO.works, the city coordinated all of these encroachments during a weekly meeting, with all public service departments invited. This manual coordination was useful, but was ineffective at catching all the required coordination, resulting in unintended traffic congestion. Florence recognized the need to expedite permit processing time, and deploy a virtual one-stop application portable, available 24/7.
GEO.works on-line utility permit applications went live in November 2011, including full coordination of more than 5,000 permits per year. In 2015 the system was expanded to include moving and scaffolding management (8000 permits per year), with fully automated procedures for front and back-office management.
In 2017 Florence decided to extend the system with automated Traffic Control Plan management and Traffic Engineering Orders, converting the business process to geographic/digital management. In conjunction with this initiative, the city developed a new app using GEO.works data to provide real-time traffic conditions to its citizens. The same GEO.works data are used with Traffic Supervisor (a technology-based traffic management control room) where engineers monitor conditions and control all traffic control devices.
