The roads of Brazil are about to become more sophisticated and safer.

As announced this month, IBM and the Agencia de Transporte do Estado de Sao Paulo (ARTESP), the regulatory agency that oversees public transportation for the State of Sao Paulo, are collaborating to improve transit for 20 million people.

By opening an information control center, designed to ensure the quality of service on the state’s highways, the effort will unify traffic data, incident management, and service delivery through the use of advanced analytics.

“The Information Control Center for the state will be able to oversee Sao Paulo’s highways in near real time. With IBM technology in place we will now have the right tools to check quality of services provided by each administrator and also the corresponding contract fulfillment,” said ARTESP General Director, Karla Bertocco Trindade, according to a statement. “This kind of insightful data will add to the comfort and safety for our citizens and extend the quality of the highways in our state.”

With Sao Paulo one of the country’s busiest states, the partnership is significant to the Brazilian economy, which thrives in a region of uneven development and corruption. Just to the south, Argentina’s peso declines. Crime burns throughout much of Latin America, intimidating investors and limiting a tourist trade that nevertheless generates millions in revenue.

Despite predictions of slowing growth, Brazil continues its remarkable ascent to the peak of political and economic influence in South America. The commodity, agriculture, and tourism sectors equip this culture with an infrastructure sturdy enough to host soccer’s 2014 FIFA World Cup and, as planned, the 2016 Summer Olympics.

According to Reuters, the Central Bank of Brazil reported in September that “private sector analysts have revised their 2014 growth forecasts for Brazil’s economy downward to 0.33 percent from 0.48 percent” the week prior. Such a correction is so minor in the context of Brazil’s economic health; unemployment has dropped dramatically since 2001.

The nation has its problems. Vast acres of the Amazon rainforest have been stripped bare by deforestation. As the world turned its eyes to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, protests erupted and celebrities—including Pele, the most famous Brazilian of all—spoke out about the country’s ability to serve its own people.

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Yet progress in Brazil continues, despite any interruptions of order. The ARTESP’s new information control center will capture and unify data from operational control centers of each of the 19 highway administrators that operate nearly 30 state roads. The system aims to improve supervision of nearly 4,000 miles of state highways.

Sao Paulo joins a list of large economic centers around the world that are aiming to link transit, tourism, administration, business, and services.

As reported in Insights Magazine last month, the United Arab Emirates is planning a $299 million connected city project called Silicon Park. The community, with 20,000 square meters of residential space and set for completion in 2017, will include electric car transit, robotic services, smart app access, and renewable energy sources.

The notion of interconnectivity and its results—accelerated economics, faster services, investment, tourists—appeals to the world’s most ambitious politicians. India’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced a $1.2 billion strategy to update 100 cities with communication networks.

According to CNN, Modi expressed his vision of Indian development in a June speech: “Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical fiber networks and next-generation infrastructure.”

Modi’s future might look much like present-day Amsterdam, which has become a global leader in interconnectivity. As described on its site, Amsterdam Smart City involves “more than 70 partners that are involved in a variety of projects focusing on energy transition and open connectivity. ASC is all about the total sum of testing innovative products and services, understanding the behavior of the residents and users of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and sustainable economic investments.”

It is staggering just how many ways a city can modernize its activities. Amsterdam offers a smart traffic management system, which has decreased vehicle loss hours by 10 percent; a traffic reporting service that suggests ideal routes to travelers and a data-driven energy atlas that shows resources usage levels; and dozens of other initiatives.

In Sao Paulo, the state of transit will evolve from slow, physical responses to accidents, delays, and weather. The new solution built on IBM Intelligent Operations Center enables the state to verify and confirm incidents in real time, which allows more efficient handling and routing of traffic across the entire state. In addition to data from each administrator’s control centers—which receive information through sensors, weather stations, call-boxes, and other connected devices— the state’s central information control center will now also be able to centralize new data streams such as traffic reports and revenue data from toll plazas, as the statement explains.

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