Open Data - GXBus (Montevideo - Uruguay)

Montevideo is the capital of Uruguay. It houses more than half of the country’s 3.3 million people. It is the heart of the growing industry and it is expanding its shared services sector and growing the interest in Finance and Accounting Outsourcing. In Uruguay, most of the population and labor force is concentrated in the Montevideo metropolitan area (61%), and all global services companies are located in this city.

Montevideo was the first Latin America city to have an open data policy (2010). The public data provided by Montevideo City fostered the creation of new open-data applications developed either by public services or by the private sector, benefiting citizens and giving them new and ubiquitous services. One of them was the GXBus initiative in 2013. The GXBus is a free application for all sort of smartphone devices that gives information to users about Montevideo public transports. The application’s goal is to provide Montevideo citizens with a tool to navigate in the city transport system, giving them information about how to reach a destination and when the bus arrives at the box station.

The innovative aspect of this initiative is the fact that it is a bottom-up smart city approach that was initiated by citizens due to the fact that they needed it. Nonetheless, there are some risks inherent to it, like the possibility of neglecting other public transport information alternatives for none IT users and the dependence on ICT technology. But the risks are surpassed by the values of the initiative, as it promotes an increase in the quality of public transport services, a possible economic impact (because the number of public transport users tends to increase with this application) and the improvement of society’s mobility in the city.