TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT | 103
Next-generation traffic control Deploying traffic management hardware is only half the job when building a modern traffic control center: today’s overcrowded roads demand smart software platforms to enable more efficient transportation systems Words | Branko Glad, Telegra, Croatia
Wherever they are in the world, today’s cities, metropolitan areas and densely populated regions face similar traffic problems. Increasingly, roads are under-capacitated, often by several orders of magnitude. It’s not unheard of to have millions of vehicles traveling along networks built for hundreds of thousands. The reason for this is not only due to population growth, but also because of the enduring and increasing popularity of the car. Cars are still the first choice of transportation for most people, and most will use primary corridors. Even when a citizen wants to become more multimodal in their transportation choices, often private vehicles, public transit and other modes are not sufficiently coordinated to make this easy. Part of this problem is that traffic control centers (TCC) are not efficient enough and they do
not have sufficiently precise and detailed information about traffic to successfully coordinate it.
Demand outstrips supply Fundamentally, most road networks and related infrastructure were not designed and built with the exponential rise in population and demand for transportation that we are now witnessing in mind. Furthermore, the development of alternative transportation modes is failing to meet rising demand. But, despite the lack of new infrastructure, it is possible to make what we do have work more efficiently, by enhancing TCCs. TCCs are at the heart of transportation systems and therefore well placed to manage flows across limited infrastructure resources. But first, divisions between different systems need to be broken down. Today, traffic management is typically built
up of separate individual systems: traffic signal management, advanced ITS, tunnel management, traffic counting, CCTV, etc. This all results in the fact that, although TCCs do exist, they are relatively inefficient because they are running non-integrated and non-coordinated systems based on insufficient and non-synthesized traffic data. Traffic management strategies applied from such TCCs are rudimentary, slow in implementation, and usually end with poor results. TCCs in this first generation may be working at as little as 10% of their true potential.
Current limits on TCCs The fundamental aims of TCCs are to: monitor traffic situations; identify possible congestion in advance; identify traffic incidents (and accidents) immediately, as they happen; activate the correct strategies
Annual Showcase 2018 | Intertraffic World
