Being pragmatic about Smart Cities: Traffic Managment
Worldwide, per day, 180 Thousand People move into cities, on a yearly basis that is more or less the total population of France (66 Mio people). Asia is definitely the center of gravity for this urbanisation movement, but even in Europe, cities like London are growing at the rate of 2 doubledecker buses of people per day. Cities are essential to global economic growth and productivity. They are the world's economic engine, generating 80 percent of GDP and adapting to this growth in a sustainable way is a key challenge.
Cities also produce 70 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions, smog and traffic issues are increasingly impacting the Quality of Life. In order for cities to capture economic growth in an heavily urbanized environment, measures need to be taken towards safeguarding Quality of Life.
Changes need to be made both on infrastructure side as well as in behavioral patterns. In absence of unlimited funds to transform cities into "smart cities", high impact areas that allow reaching measurable results in a relatively short timeframe and then communicate them in order to empower citizens to rethink their behavioral patterns. Connected Technologies and the associated data processing capability are enablers for this. Innovation in (1) Mobility / Transport, (2) City Services, (3) Energy & Water will all contribute to an improved Quality of Life in the smart city of the future.
Today, the economic cost, but increasingly the perceived reduction in Quality of Life related to congested roads is reaching a tipping point in many municipalities. Considering that 40% of City Traffic is related to people looking for a parking spot, moving towards Smart Traffic Management offers a high potential return.
Based on a recent Juniper Research Report looking into Smart City strategies and Technologies, over the next three years, smart city traffic management will reduce the equivalent of CO2 emissions produced by 35 million vehicles, or 164 million metric tonnes.
Smart City Traffic Management Solutions
Smart traffic management can take many forms. For example, using technology to detect traffic congestion and dynamically change speed limits to clear up the roads, or allow public transit vehicles like buses to get priority lanes. A central platform for effective traffic management is required allowing city operators to manage following cases:
Traffic Engineering and Consulting - based on real time and historical mobility data (multiple sources), analyse traffic and pro-actively design solutions.
Urban Parking Management: dynamic parking guidance based on real-time availability as well as floating car data to reduce overall traffic (30-40%) and optimize parking fee income.
Urban Traffic Management: Monitor traffic using different data layers (speed, congestion, service layers) and apply toolbox for traffic flow optimization.
Temporary Traffic Management: Traffic jam detection using a combination of floating car data, sensor data and traffic algorithms - Automated scenario triggering, bringing the right information on the right display at the right time.
Bicycle Monitoring: bicycle traffic detection and visualization helping urban mobility planners to promote cycling.
Smart Traffic Management is one aspect of Smart City Implementation that is highly visible. Beyond the technical solution, real user engagement is the only way to realize sustainable change in behavioral patterns.
Complementary City Services around e.g. public transportation need to be built to support this user engagement.
For City Authorities, by nature being slow at innovation, it might make sense to follow an open API approach, allowing users to innovate on top of the data that an intelligent smart city infrastructure generates, make all of the city’s information available to developers, and let them make their own apps.
Managing the increasing burden of traffic congestion is a high priority topic on the agenda of many city authorities. Technical Solutions are available to effectively reduce the economic and Quality of Life burden caused by traffic congestion. The implementation of Smart Traffic Solutions exposes the real challenge in the evolution towards Smart Cities: how to engage with citizens to jointly realize a sustainable environment?
