A lamp can be better coordinated than GPS.
After writing it here, it will be hard not to notice: the street lamps in the city of Lisbon are numbered. You can usually find this numbering at the top of the poles. Not all lampposts are referenced, only those that are the responsibility of Territorial Coordination Unit of the Lisbon City Council.
This numbering is made up of a Geographic Information System (GIS)The number is composed of nine digits and a four- or five-digit number, which is affixed to a small tablet on the lampposts. With this georeferencing work, the municipality's teams can quickly locate a broken lamp on the street and repair it - they can know exactly where it is without needing complex GPS coordinates, street names or specific references about each street.
All the mapping data for the city's street lamps is available in open formatand can be downloaded or viewed on an online map. There are currently close to 63,000 georeferenced poles.
But what if this work of numbering the poles could be used for emergency situations and for INEM rescue teams, for example, to better identify the location of incidents? In Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, this is precisely what happens, according to the YouTube channel Honest Guide.
Prague's lamps are, like Lisbon's, mapped and can also be found online. But in the Czech capital, the numbers serve as a kind of geolocation coordinates - shorter and simpler than the usual GPS coordinates, as it contains only six digits - which can be provided to emergency teams to quickly locate incidents and send help, as the Honest Guide channel explains. This avoids sharing references about the surroundings of the incident or trying to find out the name of the street, which is not always visible.
What if the same system were applied to Lisbon? As far as Lisboa Para Pessoas has been able to ascertain, the work of geo-referencing public lamps has not been shared with the emergency services to make it work as it does in Prague, but we have not been able to get answers in good time from Lisbon City Council about this project.
