PurposeA sustainable transportation system should represent a win-win situation: minimizing transport's impact on the environment and reducing natural disasters' effects on transportation. A well-distributed set of rain gauges is crucial for monitoring services in smart cities. However, those services should consider the uncertainties about the registers of rainfall impacts. In this paper, the authors present a case study of optimal rain gauge location based on an actual database of rainfall events with impacts on urban mobility in the city of Sao Paulo (Brazil).Design/methodology/approachThis paper presents a maximal covering location formulation and proposes a robustness analysis considering spatial location perturbations.FindingsIn this case study, the robustness of the objective function is above 99.99%. The robustness for the number of covered demand points is 88.93%, and the frequency associated with every candidate is between 11.71% and 69.49%.Originality/valueIncorporating spatial uncertainties on coverage problems is essential to provide stakeholders more realistic supporting tools and to draw different possible scenarios.