Companies and government organizations in Oss, such as the police or municipality, can now see how busy it is in the center via a digital dashboard. They can also see how visitors get to the city center and where they park. With this they can improve the center. Part of that information comes from the telephone records of visitors and residents. What does that mean for them?
Increasingly, apps are asking phone users for permission to track their location. These are mainly weather and travel apps or navigation apps such as Google Maps. The Oss center management and the Argaleo company use this data to fill the digital dashboard.
But how exactly does that work? “Those apps provide your GPS location anonymously once every 15 minutes. For example, we see 150 telephones on the market in Oss at the same time,” explains director Jeroen Steenbakkers of Argaleo. “You can read which companies you give permission to, so this is privacy-proof. Of course, not everyone gives permission to track a location, so we make a calculation.”
In combination with public information such as maps and company data, the company populates the digital dashboard. Entrepreneurs and organizations can find important information about the center of Oss there. Consider how many visitors there are in the center, but also, for example, the number of vacant retail properties.
“The data is used to improve the center of Oss.”
But what good is it for citizens to share their data? “These data are used to improve the center of Oss in all sorts of ways,” says center manager and initiator Jack van Lieshout.
“If the municipality sees that many people come to the city by car, they can, for example, build bicycle routes or expand parking spaces. Or think about events. If you see that it is very busy every year, the police can deploy extra people.”
But the dashboard also helps with vacancy. “Now you can convince entrepreneurs with numbers. In the past I could only tell you how busy the center is, but now I can show it,” says Steenbakkers. So the consumer also benefits from it.
“The data is unique compared to the major cities.”
Such a digital dashboard is already being used in Brabant in Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Tilburg, Helmond and Breda. But what is unique about Oss’s dashboard is that there is much more data available than in those large municipalities.
“I have been keeping data on paper since 2011. Then I walked through the center of Oss and then I noted which buildings were vacant or in which sector a store was active,” says van Lieshout. “That information is unique because I wrote everything down myself.”
And that turns out to be an advantage. “If you see that there are already many women’s fashion stores in the center of Oss, you can try to attract more men’s clothing stores to the center,” he says. “In this way we create a center with a very varied offer.”