ITS – for a better transport system

By Lionel WIJESIRI

An Intelligent Transport System A traffic jam

Sri Lanka would face a crisis when the number of vehicles in the country reaches five million by the end of the year with limited road capacity, Deputy Minister of Transport Rohana Kumara Dissanayake told Parliament recently. He said that statistically, one out of four families owned a vehicle today. He said that the Government had identified the impending problem and had increased the import duty of vehicles to discourage imports.

Getting caught in a traffic jam often brings out the worst in most of us. We blame bad drivers, poor road conditions, burgeoning traffic, absence of a mass rapid transport system and unbridled urbanisation for the troubles we face while navigating a city road. While all these may have contributed to the urban road chaos, seldom do we stop to consider why things aren’t changing despite the vast amounts of money being invested in transport infrastructure.

Besides increasing traffic congestion, urban areas are also faced with several other transport-related problems such as the increasing emission of pollutants and depleting fuel resources that adversely impact the overall well-being of any major city. Studies have shown that an effective transport system is important for a city’s economic competitiveness and severe congestion is known to have a negative impact on GDP.

To make transport management more effective, several cities across the world are trying to build intelligence into existing systems. Transport management systems and software tools have been effective to curtail traffic woes around some mega cities of the world. For example, in London, a congestion management system has lowered traffic volumes to mid-1980s levels. The system in Singapore can predict traffic speeds with nearly 90 percent accuracy. With future enhancements, the system will help predict - rather than merely monitor - other traffic conditions as well.

Solutions

Although Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have been around for some time, the new generation of solutions offers features such as traffic prediction, analytics and decision support, traveller information, advisory services, ticketing and fare collection. Innovative tools such as roadside sensors, radio frequency tags and global positioning systems also help monitor and manage transport more effectively.

For example, traffic prediction helps multi-modal planning whereby transport services can be integrated to provide seamless and efficient movement of people. Analytics and decision support helps in continuous, system-wide performance measurements that help provide optimal solutions to a city’s dynamic transport needs. Providing integrated ticketing and fare collection enhances commuter comfort by integrating rail, bus and parking fares.

Sustained research across cities has revealed that an intelligent transport system is much more than just discrete software solutions. It is about adopting user-centric approaches that create a shift in their attitudes to cost, value and use of transport systems. That is why leading cities worldwide are using these technologies to implement transport strategies and create holistic transport solutions that address three key strategies: governance, transport network optimisation and integrated transport services.

Information technology

Information technology (IT) has transformed many industries, from education to healthcare to government, and is now in the early stages of transforming transportation systems. While many think improving a country’s transportation system solely means building new roads or repairing ageing infrastructure, the future of transportation lies not only in concrete and steel, but also increasingly in using IT. IT enables elements within the transportation system - vehicles, roads, traffic lights and message signs - to become intelligent by embedding them with microchips and sensors and empowering them to communicate with each other through wireless technologies. In the leading nations, IT Systems bring significant improvement in transportation system performance, including reduced congestion and increased safety and traveller convenience.

Unfortunately, in this context, Sri Lanka lags most of the other Asian countries in ITS deployment. For the most part, this has been the result of two key factors: a continued lack of adequate funding for ITS and the lack of the right organisational system to drive ITS in Sri Lanka, particularly the lack of a scientific approach that has prevailed to date.

Groups

Intelligent transportation systems include a wide and growing suite of technologies and applications. ITS applications can be grouped within five summary categories:

* Advanced Traveller Information Systems provide drivers with real-time information, such as transit routes and schedules; navigation directions; and information about delays due to congestion, accidents, weather conditions or road repair work.

* Advanced Transportation Management Systems include traffic control devices such as traffic signals, ramp meters, variable message signs, and traffic operations centres.

* ITS-Enabled Transportation Pricing Systems include systems such as electronic toll collection (ETC), congestion pricing, fee-based express (HOT) lanes, and vehicle miles travelled (VMT) usage-based fee systems.

* Advanced Public Transportation Systems, for example, allow trains and buses to report their position so that passengers can be informed of their real-time status (arrival and departure information).

Fully integrated intelligent transportation systems, such as vehicle-to-infrastructure (VII) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) integration, enable communication among assets in the transportation system, for example, from vehicles to roadside sensors, traffic lights, and other vehicles.

ITS delivers five key classes of benefits by:

* Increasing safety,
* Improving operational performance, particularly by reducing congestion,
* Enhancing mobility and convenience,
*Delivering environmental benefits,
* Boosting productivity and expanding economic and employment growth.

In short, ITS maximises the capacity of infrastructure, reducing the need to build additional highway capacity. For example, research has found that by applying real-time traffic data to US traffic signal lights, traffic flow can improve significantly, reducing stops by as much as 40 percent, reducing travel time by 25 percent, cutting gas consumption by 10 percent (1.1 million gallons of gas annually), and cutting emissions by 22 percent (cutting daily carbon dioxide emissions by 9,600 tons).

Issues

Whether it’s with regard to ITS systems or those that can be deployed locally that face systemic barriers, many countries under-invest in ITS.

This happens, in part, because transportation funding is often allocated without consideration of performance, giving transportation planners little incentive to preference investments that can have a maximum impact on optimising system performance.

Another part of the problem is that State and local transportation agencies were created to build and maintain infrastructure, not to manage transportation networks, and thus see themselves as “builders of pieces” and not “managers of a system” and therefore place more emphasis on building new roads than ensuring the system functions optimally.

Apart from being generally under-funded, another challenge for ITS projects is that they often have to compete for funding with conventional transportation projects - fixing potholes, repairing roads and building new ones - that may be more immediately pressing, but don’t deliver as great long-term returns.

ITS faces a range of institutional and organisational barriers, including limited understanding of the technology and jurisdictional challenges, such as which level of government - Central or Provincial - has responsibility for or jurisdiction over ITS deployments.

While intelligent transportation systems face a number of challenges, none of them is insurmountable, and many nations have overcome them.

The potential of ITS has encouraged many developing countries to make them an integral part of the Common Transport Policy, with the aim of establishing a co-ordinated infrastructure for ITS.

Traffic management has been a challenge in Sri Lanka and continues to become more difficult with every passing day. It cannot be addressed only by constructing new roads, bridges and underpasses.

The solution lies in taking an integrated approach to traffic management and leveraging advanced technologies and intelligent solutions.