Brasília

The water network was instrumented first, and quietly. In November 2023 Caesb began fitting wireless sensors to control valves on its main distribution networks under a R$5.2 million contract covering 754 measurement points, watched from two network-operation control rooms. The diagnostic is simple: flow up while pressure falls means a burst; uniformly low pressure means an area is about to run dry. By May 2024, 378 of the 754 points were installed. The company has published no figure for what the telemetry changed, and the claim it does make is the narrow one — finding a burst faster shortens the interruption.

Then came the system that makes the pattern legible. Two 2024 instructions put SIMLUR at the centre of contract measurement for urban cleaning: the city does not merely track its contractors' vehicles, it pays them from the track, overlaying the day's GPS signals on planned routes and counting the kilometres actually covered. The rule is unusually candid about its own limits — where processing shows 95% or more of a planned route executed, the service credits it in full, an explicit tolerance written in for signal interference.

The bus control room existed before any of it and only acquired a public face in 2025. The transport secretariat's supervision centre watches all 3,049 urban buses in real time across more than 22,500 trips a working day; on 29 July 2025 that feed was opened to passengers as DF no Ponto, which reported more than 538,000 installs in its first year. The secretariat says it now monitors every operator's fleet, where previously each company watched only its own from its own command centre.