The CEO of the Information and Communication Technology Organization of Mashhad Municipality says that more than one million microtransactions are done daily in this city using the I Card smart card.
According to the Iran digital economy annotation, Mohammad Reza Samii stated: the approach of this organization was not monopolistic and it follows this issue after Man Kart in Mashhad’s citizenship superapplication, “My City”.
Online citizen services in Mashhad
He said: In the municipality, we had tried to provide our services through the portal in the past. First, we launched e.mashhad.ir because all over the world electronic services usually operate with this prefix. Today, our electronic services are provided centrally through sm.mashhad.ir.
In this site, various services such as construction, transportation and municipal services are categorized. Services such as green spaces, street cleaning, garbage collection, safety and firefighting services, cemeteries, etc., which citizens may not know about, but are provided through the categories listed on this site.
Considering that in the last few years, especially in the last decade, smart devices such as smartphones have expanded, citizens can access electronic services in addition to the sm.mashhad.ir portal through the “My City” super application. .
In the past years, efforts to electronicize services have been one of the priorities of the organization and will continue until citizens do not need to visit the municipality in person. Today, about 70% of our services are provided electronically. Of course, in some cases, the legal regulations must be updated, which is out of the hands of the country’s municipalities.
We have laws in the country that in some cases do not allow us to completely remove parallel services. We should try to update our laws and regulations in parallel, which is being done through the city and high councils of the provinces and the Islamic Council.
Development of “I Card”
Samii continued: Mashhad is a religious metropolis and citizens travel to it from different parts of the country. Our approach in Mashhad Municipality regarding the provision of services has always been such that if a person travels to this city from other places, the tools will be available to him in advance.
From the beginning, our effort has been to ensure that this card is not only for Mashhad, and that is why we named it “I Card”. In 2009 and 2010, we had meetings to exchange its technical protocols with other metropolises, including Tehran and Isfahan, which was not possible due to technical and managerial reasons.
Citizen card for micro payment or “I card” and related systems are currently the means of payment and daily management of more than one million citizen micro transactions in bus, subway and a number of taxi lines. “I card” has been one of the most successful micro-payment projects in the country, which, in addition to ease of payment, provides the authorities with the information of the public transport fleet.
Providing national code has not been generally binding. We had to identify people during certain periods of time when we wanted to offer discounted services to a group of people. In this situation, we assigned them a special “man card” that their personal information is specified for us and they are identified in our acceptance tools, i.e. bus card readers and metro gates.
One of the horizons we have considered for I card is the physical removal of the card. Wherever we are dealing with hardware, we prefer to remove hardware if we can find a software solution. It is not technically impossible, but it is difficult due to communication infrastructure and other reasons.
It has been one of our goals that people don’t necessarily have to carry a card with them on the bus and can pay with other methods such as QR code, which will take time to realize, but we are trying to implement it. Even to integrate I card with bank cards or national cards and not have our own exclusive card is one of the goals we have been looking for.
“My City” internet taxi service
Samii: Online taxi is a common service that we all have used in these few years from its big providers. However, issues such as travel management and payment in taxis covered by the Taxi Management and Supervision Organization have caused special applications to be made for them in these few years, which have not been welcomed for various reasons.
One of our other problems, which is not present in many cities of the country, is the calculation of the cost of taxis based on the “taxi meter”, a hardware device with maintenance issues. Facing these issues, we have designed an application that will be available under “My City”. Our horizon for the internet taxi service of my city is to cover all four categories of taxis under the management of Mashhad taxi organization, i.e. circular taxis, linear taxis, entry points and wireless taxis.
Fava’s agenda was to create a special application for taxis, but our approach from the beginning is to put a super application at the disposal of all citizens, which does not confront them with multiple applications. The production of separate applications is expensive and technical issues have caused us to create the access of the Internet taxi service through “My City” for the time being.
Our plan is to keep the taxi section in my city software, but regarding its naming, we may give it a special name. Although we are forced to have a special software for drivers, but in public areas, our main priority is not to confront citizens with secondary software.
Waste separation software in “my city”
The aim of the smart city is to improve the quality of life of the citizens and for this purpose it uses information technology tools. Among the indicators of a smart city is the amount of waste separation from the source by citizens, and we in information technology organizations must provide such tools.
We have several software for people to sort their own waste, call the crew and we get money or points for it. This will encourage people to produce less waste and separate it. Our task was the same, so that the citizen can more easily deliver his garbage, receive points and use this point in other citizen services. It means that information technology tools help for a smart city index. As a result, in addition to paying attention to this goal and improving quality, we also avoid issues such as monopoly.
We could give the whole city to one app, but that would create a monopoly for one service company. So the infrastructure is ready for companies that are willing to get behind a product called “My City”. We have created the space for companies interested in smart waste collection to exchange web services with us.
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