Torrevieja Council, in collaboration with the waste disposal contractor ACCIONA, has joined a number of other municipalities in the “CITY IN TOUCH” mobile phone application initiative which facilitates the reporting of problems related to public services and infrastructure, such as street cleaning, waste collection, and transportation, as well as the maintenance of its coasts, and on public roads.
In the press release, the government team are of course taking credit for developing the app, “From these municipal areas, work has been done to make it a joint tool and thus easier for the user. We will continue to include other services of this city council in this same App to continue unifying in a single application all possible incidents that citizens may request to be repaired or corrected”.
However, the app was actually developed by Distromel, a technology innovation company who have been operating for some 30 years, based in Huesca, and in receipt of EU funding for many of their projects.
City in Touch was launched in August 2022, being what they saw as the final piece of the jigsaw, integrating citizen participation into their already developed smart city system.
None the less, it is a good and robust system, which will make reporting incidents easier, so long as those reports are then actioned and rectified.
Some of the situations that can be reported through the app includes beach and street cleaning, waste collection (or lack of), damage to pavements and pedestrian areas as well as roads, damaged street furniture, etc.
“CITY in Touch” allows the citizens of Torrevieja to notify any incident they detect regarding the urban cleaning service, the press release continues, such as, for example, the overflowing of or lack of bins, broken litter bins, etc. Once the incident is notified, the citizen will be able to know its status at all times, until it is resolved. Additionally, through the application, you can locate the closest containers depending on the type of waste, as well as consult news of interest regarding the service. Likewise, the application includes the possibility of detecting incidents on public roads for repair.
We must stress, this kind of app is a good thing, and if it works it should improve services. We must not forget that Acciona hired a team of inspectors to ride around Torrevieja with the intention of fining people who misuse the waste services, such as putting rubbish in a dustbin at the wrong time, and so it is not a huge leap to ask those inspectors to also monitor the service provision with a view to rectifying problems that the contractor is not fulfilling, like missing or broken bins for example, but that might be a leap too far into logic.
“If it works”, we say, so we will put it to the test. On 26 August 2023, The Leader published an article in which a resident stated that Torrevieja is “like living in a slum”. That article published in The Leader was subsequently presented in the plenary session as an indicator od how Acciona and the town hall are failing to deliver what is the most expensive public service from the annual budget. The lady in question has since reported the problems in the urbanisation’s AGM, duly recorded, with the administrators promising to report the matters to the town hall.
We therefore returned to the “scene of the crime”. Looking at the “City in Touch” app, the “container map” tells us that there are 5 large dustbins at the site. The reality is that there are 4, however, 1 is a glass container and operated by Ecovidrio, and therefore not part of this operation, so the real number in the sense of the Acciona contract is 3. This street, incidentally, like many others, used to have more locations for dustbins, which were closer to the residents, who now have to walk, or as many choose to, drive, to their dustbins, thanks to the “improvements” to the service.
The app tells us that of the 5 bins it claims are in place, 2 are yellow, 1 black, 1 grey, and 1 brown. To confuse matters slightly, the grey bin in the app is for “paper and cartons” (cardboard), which is blue in reality, but does not exist and has never existed either in this location, or the previous sites on this road. The brown bin for organic waste also doesn’t exist. The reality at this site is that there are 3 containers, 2 for “normal” waste, and 1 for recycling, which, despite finally being replaced only a few weeks ago, is constantly overflowing because it is not big enough to satisfy the number of properties it serves.
Regarding paper and cartons, this dustbin does not exist. In fact, in this entire area of the Jardin del Mar urbanisation, we were unable to find a single paper and cardboard dustbin.
So, let us put it to the test. On Thursday 28 September 2023, we have taken photographs of the site and submitted them to the app, stating that the paper and carton bin does not exist, nor has it ever, and it has been created in the app as an incident which we can monitor until it is resolved. We will (hopefully) report back on our findings.
Bearing in mind that the app has not been developed by Torrevieja town hall as they claim, but by Distromel, the service and functionality is already available to many other municipalities across Spain, and locally, you can also download the app and report problems in Dolores, Novelda, and Murcia, for example, amongst the near 50 municipalities already using the service.
The app is available on both Android and iOS and is available for free from the respective app stores, and, for the most part, it is available in English.
