Municipalities can use currently available data generated by global positioning systems (GPSes), vehicle tracking and cellphones to manage traffic smartly and improve travel times, says vehicle routing specialist company TomTom Southern Africa GM Danny Grobben.
Inefficient use of road capacity leads to severe traffic delays, but a smart traffic management system can enable motorists to be routed along alternative roads, reducing the impact of events that affect traffic flow, says TomTom South Africa country manager Daan Henderickx.
“Cities and municipalities often build expensive infrastructure to monitor and manage traffic. “However, the amount of data available on road use and the data generated by road users provide a way of deploying traffic management systems without the need for significant infrastructure. Municipalities can deploy traffic management systems using available data,” he says.
TomTom devices provide these capabilities for their users, enabling the system to guide users onto alternative routes, which eases congestion and reduces travel delays.
“Our system draws accurate GPS data from TomTom devices, anonymous vehicle tracking information and fleet management systems. “We can then monitor the speed of traffic flow along all routes in near real time, enabling us to determine viable alternative routes that users can take to avoid congestion,” explains Grobben.
“These efficient routing capabilities can then be extrapolated to create a traffic management system by routing vehicles along alternative routes, making road use more efficient,” he emphasises.
Although supplementary traffic information can be drawn from cellphone location data, such data is not widely available in South Africa, where TomTom relies instead on highly accurate information generated by GPS devices.
“Our data-sourcing model in South Africa is different from our European operation. In Europe, TomTom uses a large amount of cellphone-location data to determine traffic flow, which is not as accurate as the smaller amount of GPS data it uses in South Africa,” says Henderickx.
The cost of building infrastructure to enable smart traffic management in cities is high and such systems often take a long time to deploy, partly owing to equipment costs.
“The traditional responses to dealing with traffic congestion, including building new roads or widening existing ones, are no longer proving effective. “The way in which traffic is managed needs to be changed significantly to improve the efficient use of all available roads,” says Henderickx.
Congestion often occurs because users are not aware of alternative routes. However, the algorithms built into each TomTom unit enable it to use real-time data from traffic reports and other TomTom devices to calculate the most time-efficient route along all roads.
All the data TomTom receives from GPS units, TomTom devices and traffic report systems is collated every two minutes and sent to its devices, enabling them to use the information of travel times along all routes and intelligent routing algorithms to determine the most efficient route.
“Even if we can provide smart routing for 10% of road users, this will reduce congestion on all routes. “If we can broaden and integrate the use of smart routing into a traffic management system, we can reduce congestion significantly and improve travel times and efficiencies on all roads of a city or municipality,” concludes Grobben.