Technology can ease traffic congestion

30 November 2006
By Ravindra Kadam

Aditya is a manager of a retail chain in Mumbai. Every day, he drives down from his home in Borivali to midtown Mumbai. The to-and-fro commute eats up a good 3-4 hours of his daily life: valuable hours that he could have better spent with his wife and 6-year-old kid.

Over the years, he has seen the construction of many new flyovers. They succeeded in easing congestion for a while, but increasing vehicular traffic soon caught up, and it was the same old story of hour-long snarls all over again.

Aditya has often wondered what it would take to ease Mumbai’s traffic woes.

Traffic congestion is a serious problem in most Indian metros. The scorching pace of economic growth and the growing incomes of India’s burgeoning middle class are only likely to make the situation worse. Public transport systems are overloaded, and there is a limit on how much additional infrastructure such as roads and rail lines a city can add.

Of course, city planners are doing the best they can to cope with the increasing stress on the transportation infrastructure. For instance, in Mumbai, tens of flyovers have been – and continue to be – constructed, and existing roads are being widened.

But creating more infrastructure is not a solution by itself. The improvements in infrastructure will always lag behind the increase in traffic. Its benefits are only short-term; what’s needed is a more imaginative, holistic and integrated approach to the problem.

A piece of statistic from the Mumbai Traffic Police web site illustrates the magnitude of the problem: While length of roads in Mumbai increased two times between 1951 and 2004, the population increased 4 times and the number of vehicles a whopping 37 times.

CHANGE IN TRAFFIC SCENARIO

The improving-infrastructure approach seeks to accommodate the future. What is also needed is a preventive approach to actually reduce the traffic on the roads. This can be achieved in two ways.

Build better public transport systems: An efficient public transport system can effectively reduce the traffic on city roads. There’s considerable evidence to suggest vehicle owners will use a mass transit system, if a good one is available. In fact, because of traffic snarls and the problem of finding parking space, many commuters in cities like New York and London choose to travel by the metro rail network.

Many cities in India are already taking steps in this direction. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently laid the foundation for a metro rail network in Mumbai. City authorities are also exploring providing public transport on sea routes that connect important hubs of Mumbai.

But building such alternative transportation systems requires huge investments. That is where we come to the second approach.

Reduce traffic through congestion charging schemes: Cities around the world such as Singapore and London have introduced congestion charging schemes to reduce traffic. For instance, in London, drivers are charged a fee for entering the Central London zone. The idea was to ensure that those using the road infrastructure made a financial contribution towards it, discourage vehicle owners from making unnecessary journeys and encourage the use of public transport systems.

The results were impressive indeed: traffic in central London went down 10-15 per cent, and traffic speeds went up by a similar percentage.

What made the London Congestion Charging Project such a success was technology.

Using technology to solve traffic woes

The aim of the LCC project was to reduce traffic in the centre of London during peak hours by charging vehicle owners a fee to drive through the area at certain times. What was unique about the project was that there were no toll gates or barriers to collect charges from vehicle owners.

Instead, a network of cameras records the number plates of vehicles entering the city centre. An automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system grabs the live video stream of vehicles, converts them to still images, uses certain in-built business logic to identify the number plate from the image, then applies OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools and converts the number plates into text. These numbers are stored in a database. This database is then used to charge vehicle owners. Hence, charges could be collected without slowing down traffic in any way.

As a result of the LCC, traffic in the zone was reduced by 10 to 15% and speeds increased by 10 to 15%

Singapore too has had a lot of success with its Electronic Road Pricing Scheme. Technology plays a big role in the success of the scheme, albeit in a slightly different way than in London. In Singapore, gantries are located at all entrances to the central business district and on roads with heavy traffic. Cars are equipped with an in-vehicle unit that contains a pre-paid cash card. Every time a car passes under a gantry, a toll is automatically deducted from the cash card.

Cities in India can use either of the two examples. Congestion charging brings with it a dual advantage: it reduces traffic on the roads and generates funds that can go towards improving alternative systems of transport.

But congestion charging can be a politically loaded issue. In London, too, it was not an easy decision to introduce a fee for private vehicles to use certain roads. But London Mayor Ken Livingstone remained committed to his vision, and Londoners today enjoy the fruits of the LCC. Introducing such schemes in India will require political consensus and strong political will.

From a technology and project implementation stand point, India has no dearth of talent. After all, our IT talent is exported across the world to solve some of the most complex challenges. It’s time we harness it to solve domestic problems as well. Indian companies have enormous experience in successfully implementing large-scale, citizen-facing, mission-critical projects. And these are challenges the Indian IT industry will welcome with open arms.