The transportation sector plays a very crucial role in making smart cities efficient, safe and smarter by ensuring mobility for all road users, including children, the elderly, women, and the physically disabled. Mobility is one of the key components of smart cities. Many developed cites, such as London, New York, Munich, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore and Amsterdam, are increasingly trying to improve quality of life by enhancing smart seamless mobility though wider application of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS).
For making smarter transport infrastructure, the capacity of our transport corridors (road, rail, air, and sea) is also to be enhanced through ITS. This must be done whilst simultaneously reducing accidents, pollution and congestion. We can achieve our capacity goals either by building more fixed infrastructure, or by using our existing infrastructure more intelligently. More fixed infrastructure takes decades to plan and build, costs huge sums of money, and makes no significant contribution to reducing accidents or pollution.
Several Indian cities, such as Hyderabad, Surat, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Mangalore, Jamshedpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai, Nai Raipur, Surat, and Kochi have already begun deploying some smart technologies to efficiently provide transport services as mentioned under:
● Deployment of advanced communications systems in Metro rail systems
● Traffic management systems using BTRACK in Bengaluru
● Corridor Traffic Signal Synchronization using the Composite Signal Control Strategy developed by C-DAC, in Thiruvananthapuram
● Electronic Tolling on most newly-constructed national highways
● Parking charges via an online computer system at Delhi’s Palika Bazaar
● Finding the shortest time and path between a pair of origin and destination on a smartphone, and its use in traffic navigation systems.
● Common Mobility Card, to be launched soon in Delhi
So far, significant progress towards developing smart transportation is not much visible, as out of a total of 5,116 projects, approximately 1,461 projects have been implemented till date. To make a city smart, ITS will be one of the key elements for making the transportation system safe, efficient and sustainable.
The measures include roadside equipment for speed enforcement and violation of red lights, surveillance and patrolling, advanced traffic management, traffic information centres, variable message signs, automatic incident detection, re-routing of traffic in case of an event, and pre-trip traffic information systems. Presently, a number of technologies are increasingly being used for deployment of ITS, including various types of anti-collision systems such as Forward Collision Warning Systems, Lane Departure
Warning Systems, Electronic Vehicle Stability Control, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.
London has enforced a congestion charge to reduce traffic congestion, and maintained the effectiveness of its bus network with an increase in speed. Vehicles using bus lanes illegally are being identified by fixed and mounted cameras, generating evidence for enforcement by the civil courts. Smart technology primarily works on RFID, micro wave and infrared systems for identifying and detecting vehicles in the congestion pricing zones in London.
Using ITS, Japan will have the world’s safest road traffic society by 2021. Currently, it has three types of policies on ITS aiming at the short, medium and long term. The country will graduate to a Cooperative Vehicle Highway System (CVHS) in the near future.
European countries, the United States and Japan are investing huge amounts of money to develop a CVHS that communicates and shares information between ITS stations and moving vehicles and to give advice or facilitate actions with the objective of improving safety, sustainability, efficiency and comfort beyond the scope of stand-alone systems.