TrafficInfraTech Magazine Linking People Places & Progress
Over the years, there has been a lot of thought on the implementation of ITS to improve the transportation in cities that are often plagued with congestion, rising accidents and exploding growth in the number of private vehicles. An intelligent transport management system is the one which is integrated with Information and Communication Technology that ensures easy commute options for the people in the city. TrafficInfraTech speaks to a few ITS solution providers to understand the ITS ecosystem, present status, offerings and the challenges.
India has a massive road network and is arguably the nation with the largest road network in the world. At 1.70 km of roads per square kilometer of land, the quantitative density of India’s road network is higher than that of Japan and the United States and far higher than that of China, Brazil or Russia. Rapid vehicular growth partnered with ever increasing population, rural to urban migration and economic upsurge has put immense amount of pressure on transportation infrastructure, especially on traffic management practices in urban India.
Managing Traffic has always been a mammoth task in India. With the exponential growth of the cities, there seems to be no end to the problems. Indian cities are facing a multitude of issues such as severe congestion; deteriorating air quality; increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the transport sector; increasing road accidents; and an exploding growth in the number of private vehicles.
“In terms of where we are as a country, we are putting in place good ITS. There is a requirement of both- institutional expertise and processes to make sure we are deriving maximum possible value out of these investments. I am sure that the govt has thought about that, however it has not taken place yet. We need to build that ecosystem to derive the value out of the implemented system. Another positive factor is that till date smart city tenders are coming in. I hope that the trend will continue,” expresses Dr. Rajesh Krishnan, Director, ITS Planners and Engineers Pvt. Ltd.
ITS Planners has implemented an Intelligent Transport system in Allahabad recently, and is currently working on improving its products and offerings to make sure that the company can deliver the maximum possible value to the Indian market. This is a collaboration with the central government and the OEMs. Area Traffic Control (ATC) solution by ITS is built on the company’s ITS products the Traffic Intelligence Module (TIM) and the Traffic Intelligence Server (TIS). TIM and TIS have been extensively tested and successfully deployed at several locations around the world. The company also provides Traffic Intelligence Module.
TIM is a compact programmable hardware platform designed for use with traffic signal controllers. It comprises a processor card and an I/O card. Users can load their own traffic control logic scripts written in Perl onto the processor. These scripts can access data from the traffic controller and detectors and drive outputs or send commands via the TIM I/O card. TIM can also be used as a local data logger to capture traffic data to its microSD card.
The last few years brought dramatic advances in technology and revolutionized the expectations as citizens and clients. To compete in this environment, CIO’s, IT managers and Government need an innovative partner who anticipates technology changes and can integrate generations of technology with flexibility and quality. Supporting his views on the role of technology, Krishnan adds, “This calls for a fundamentally different way of delivering services, application software and systems integration. With a talented workforce leveraging Analytics, Big Data, Cloud, Security, IoT and Bots, we are geared to help our clients and the Government transform themselves to do digital business.”
