Cities are becoming highly populated and more urbanized at an alarming speed. In closed and congested environments climate issues are even more threatening to citizens. Modern cities are facing problems due to busy roads, public services and mess of traffic.
Cities are adopting advanced trends and technologies to tackle these problems even faster than before. Responsible for managing towns and cities are looking at big data to combat problems in a more effective, fast and convenient way.
It is easier now to comprehend and predict trends within cities with the rise in connected devices to manage multiple tasks, sensors to measure the flow of traffic, digitization to use data for artificial intelligence or machine learning and improved techniques to capture and analyze data.
Here are some practical applications of big data in cities to overcome problems.

Pollution and Climate:
Big data can improve the quality of life for citizens by unique insights which work well with other data sets such as traffic data. Mayor of London has partnered with Alan turning Institute to improve air quality in London by reducing traffic smokes and providing alternate routes for heavy traffic.
Big Data has a massive potential in policy making for every industry and it is assisting to cities management with its amazing feature. Big data is used to plan the development of new systems by understanding the population for a particular area and interest of people.
Big data is being used to demonstrate the use of transport for various services such as goods transport and can calculate cost and time with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Big data has much more granularity and it carries more scope due to its distinct properties from the traditional datasets used by governments.
Data can be used to manage the budgets of cities that can enhance policy making and transportation services.

Crowd control and transport:
Big data is managing traffic flow in an intelligent way by providing multiple solutions for traffic jams and identifying trends in congestion in larger cities. Roads can be monitored now by smarter navigation systems and data can be relayed to a control centre for further process. This process is very useful in emergency conditions and real-time data on accidents and traffic jams can divert traffic to an alternate route to avoid further resistance.
This data could be used to broadcast on citizens devices to provide information about what is happening in their surroundings, which areas are better to avoid and to change routes in real-time.
This data can also devise new controls to minimize accidents and recording data around emergencies can help to identify trends and required changes.
Movement data is also very helpful to show where new routes can be best implemented to reduce traffic issues, where public transportation is at breaking point and how to control it. Smarter public transport could potentially be automated by real-time data such as it can help to divert traffic to different areas by identifying parking loggerheads in real-time.

City planning and effective spending:
Sensor-driven tech provides a lot of information and a detailed view of the city. This view of the city is greatly beneficial for city planners because using it they can understand various aspects of the city at the same time.
Big data can also help in identifying which areas required housing investment and which areas required industrial investment. It means big data also has the potential to recognize markets that provide ease to citizens.
With effective spending in technologies for securing the city, security cameras are being used for KYC & aml compliance identity verification to detect terrorist or other criminals in cities. Governments are able to improve the local service from taxation to garbage collection with the help of the vast potential of new data sets.

Conclusion:
Big data is redefining the future of cities with its potential services and there are countless examples of it.
Cities are becoming denser and big data can provide better insights that can be used to improve the quality of services for the betterment and comfort of citizens.