Anyone who’s lived in a big city, or just had experience traveling to or through one, knows that traffic can be difficult. GPS navigation systems have helped many travelers get from point to point, but it’s not much help during rush hour or if there’s been an accident on the highway. IBM is developing a Smarter Cities Initiative, using GPS tracking and other technology, to help improve traffic conditions in cities. “Given real time traffic conditions, we can predict what up to the next 60 minutes of traffic will look like in different parts of the network,” explained Naveen Lamba, associate partner and Smart Transport leader in IBM’s Global Business Services.
The story was first reported by Bert Latamore at the Silicon Angle blog. “One of the areas that we’re focussing on is treating the whole network as one integrated multimodal system instead of trying to optimize each mode on its own, which is how it’s done today,” Lamba said. “If there’s an accident on the road, can the transit system do something to alleviate that situation? For example, advising travelers to park and switch to public transportation where feasible. They can switch to a train and so on, and vice versa.”
“There are multiple solutions, and as many of them as you can deploy, you’ll be that much better off,” Lamba said. “Each city is unique in itself and has very specific needs… Most cities start with a specific problem to gain some efficiencies. It’s up to the city whether they want a cloud-based or hosted solutions, some of which depends on their existing infrastructure.”
“What we found is many cities have solutions that advise travelers of arrival and departure times on the bus stop, for example, the next bus will arrive in 12 minutes. And that counter will keep going down as the bus gets closer. But what ends up happening is those 12 minutes may take 18 minutes to tick down to zero if the bus got delayed at some point in its route, or may continue to show an arrival time of x number of minutes even if the bus has already arrived. This is what contributes to traveler frustration and a lack of trust in the system. To regain that trust is very hard. By increasing the arrival time accuracy, traveler satisfaction is improved.”
IBM’s Smart Cities Initiative has already been tested in a number of large cities around the world, including Dublin, Ireland. “In Dublin, solutions are being deployed continually, but the rate of increase in cars and traffic has continued to grow pretty fast. By the time a solution is deployed, traffic has outpaced those deployments. So it’s hard to measure improvements because by the time you implement a vertical type of solution, you’er not dealing with the same traffic you were when you started that solution.”
In the U.S., the trend of traffic conditions is actually going in the opposite direction. “Traffic is actually tapering off,” Lamba said of traffic conditions in the U.S.. “This allows you to deploy solutions and actually see some benefit out of it.” Although it might be hard to notice in places like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, fewer people are commuting using personal vehicles. This makes testing different traffic improvement systems a lot easier.
“Analytics-based, data-driven technology platforms can help cities provide a higher level of service to their citizens while either keeping costs the same or actually even lowering them. We think it’s not going to be a choice. Cities will almost be forced into it because the demands on the city’s physical infrastructure are going to continue to increase as more and more people move to cities. In order to meet that demand, the physical infrastructure footprint is going to increase very slowly, so you have to use approaches like the Smarter Cities approach to be able to handle the higher demand.”
“There are also going to be sensors on the physical infrastructure itself. For example, an intersection would always know how many vehicles are approaching from which direction at what speed and would continually optimize the green signal timing so that the throughput through the intersection is maximized at all times.” Lamba added.
“The computing power, the analytics power, is greater than it has ever been,” Lamba explained. “The question is how you harness that capability to get the most out of existing assets that we have. How do you leverage all the data that’s out there and make quick actionable decisions that can improve the efficiency of a system? The goal is to adopt analytics-based solutions with a net effect similar to adding a lane to a highway, for example, but at a much lower price point and a much shorter period of time.”
GPS Technology Used In IBM Smarter Cities Initiative
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