Capetonians – Is your neighbour guzzling water? Click to find out
Big Brother is watching‚ and now you can too‚ thanks to a controversial City of Cape Town online water consumption map. Water-stressed city residents can use the map to check up on their neighbours’ water habits based on households’ municipal bills.
“The potential water-saving benefit for all of Cape Town of making water consumption indicators publicly available outweighs any privacy issues at this stage of the crisis‚” said Zara Nicholson‚ spokesman for mayor Patricia de Lille.
“This behaviour-modification tool attempts to acknowledge good savers and encourage those who have yet to join the efforts.”
I for one think this is a great idea as who knows a street better than the people living there. I've already see a 2-person household that uses over 6kL of water, the same as their neighbour opposite who is a 4-person household. It's a pity that the empty stands could be no readings vs over 10kL usage. I can see the City tried to keep it relatively generic. What you are really seeing is the confirmed lower usage users. But with Cape Town having around 3 months of water left desperate measures are called for as there are still many people not making a big effort to save water. These readings are actually Nov 2017 as many polls are clearly not covered yet (turning on the satellite view shows this quite clearly).
