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thinkinghighways.com

Volume 9 Number 2 June/July 2014

A SHIFT IN EMPHASISSix experts discuss the changing role of the traffic control centre

Finnish on a high

Small nation, big ideas

The approach that makes the ITS Europe Congress host country so unique

Malta’s impressive ITS implementation plans


EUROPE AND REST OF THE WORLD

EDITION

INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEMS AND ADVANCED TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

TCC Documentary Podcast available NOW!

PLUS: Listen to our ASECAP 2014 podcasts

Podcast LISTEN NOW AThttp://thinkinghighways.com/category/podcasts/

TECHNOLOGYThe importance of the perfectly executed Russian toll road, p18

INNOVATIONGeoff Collins goes hehind the scenes of a particularly English traffic project, p14

SPECIFICATIONSOpen source and open data for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, p22

SMART MOBILITYFITSRUS: the Helsinki to St Petersburg Smart Transport Corridor, p26

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Europe/Rest of the World Vol 9 No 2 thinkinghighways.com 1

THE VIEW Foreword Thinking

A welcome addition to the Thinking Highways editorial team...

Kevin Borras

It’s 1989 (don’t worry, it isn’t 1989 but I am asking you to imagine that it is). I am at my desk on the first floor

of Jane’s Information Group and I am proofreading a section of Jane’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare Yearbook. My colleague Joan wanders over with a smartly dressed young chap in tow. He is about 19 or 20. I am slightly older, 21.

“Kevin,” she said, “this is Jason Barnes, he’s joining us in a couple of weeks to work on my Defence Appointments & Procurement Handbook. Jason, this is Kevin.”

“Hi,” says new Jason, sheepishly holding out his hand for me to shake. I duly shake it. “Pleased to meet you,” he says “...but don’t slouch.”

“Pardon?” I enquire.“Don’t slouch.”“Do I slouch?”“Aye, you do a bit.”“Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”“Well, you know now,” says Jason, a

veritable coiled spring of youthful brio and faintly alarming self-confidence who was wearing the shiniest shoes I had ever seen. “See you.”

And off he strode, purposefully down the corridor, leaving most of the editorial department somewhat taken aback.

“That’s nice for you, Kevin,” said one colleague, laughing. “You’ll have someone of your own age to play with.”

“Did you notice his shoes?” asked another. “And you could cut yourself on the crease of his trousers. Smart boy.”

Little did we know that a quarter of a century later we would be announcing our reunification to an equally unsuspecting world (although anyone who read my last foreword might have been inclined to hazard a reasonably accurate guess as to who the mysterious Mr X was).

Those intervening 25 years have seen

❝Anyone who read my last foreword might have been inclined to hazard a reasonably accurate guess as to who the mysterious Mr X might have been❞

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our pairing at Jane’s last for another three before a very doleful-looking Jason emerged from a meeting to announce that he’d been made redundant and then seven years later when I took over the editorship of another title within the ITS sector and was granted the luxury of a deputy editor, he was the first person I called. We made a good team, largely because we were very different characters, approached everything (work, life in general) from different angles and yet appreciated those differences.

And then on returning from the 2001 ITS World Congress in Sydney I discovered that he had been offered the editor’s hot seat of another title within the company in my absence and that was, seemingly, that.

Four years later, while on holiday in Cornwall, Jason calls me and asks what I would think if he accepted an offer to become the editor of another magazine with the ITS sector. I can tell he really wants to take it and I wish him all the best, putting us pretty much in direct competition with each other, a competition that only intensifies upon the formation and launch of H3B Media – a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire and a really fierce one at that.

REJOINING FORCESNine years later and it’s unquestionable that Jason is one of the, if not the, most respected journalists in the ITS and advanced traffic management sphere. When we knew that he had become “available” at exactly the time that we were going public with our plans for THx, a new magazine for PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets it was almost inevitable that our career paths would dovetail for a third time.

“I see the dream team is back together,” said a delegate at a conference I attended recently. “Butch and Sundance reunited!”

I am not sure which one of them is meant to be me... but one thing’s for sure, I am paying more attention to my posture. And I’ve bought some heavy duty shoe polish.

Kevin Borras is editor of Thinking Highways and publishing director/co-founder of H3B Media. [email protected]; thinkinghighways.com

Editor in Chief Kevin Borras ([email protected]) +44 (0)20 3463 9482Art Editor Barbara Stanley ([email protected])Associate Editor, Thinking Highways/Editor, THxJason Barnes ([email protected])+44 (0)20 3463 9481Contributing Editors Richard Bishop, Paul Hutton, Andrew Pickford, Paul VorsterContributors to this issue Evgeny Atlaskin, Matti Autioniemi, Peter Paul Barbara, César Bartolomé, Richard Bishop, Johan Casselgren, Phil Charles, Geoff Collins, Kallistratos Dionelis, Greg Drach, Semyon Fokin, Marjo Hippi, Paul Hutton, Heikki Konttaniemi, Andreas Kossak, Risto Kulmala, Matti Lankinen, Kari Mäenpää, Crispin Moller, Julia Nelepa, Pertti Nurmi, Emrihan Ozdemir, José Papí, Dmitriy Plotnikov, Elias Pöyry, Karri Rantasila, Eemil Rauma, Eirik Skjetne, Alan Stevens, Timo Sukuvaara, André Vits, Hans Westerheim, Riika YlitaloNews and Web Editor Gareth Hayward ([email protected])Sales and MarketingLuis Hill ([email protected]) +44 (0)20 3463 9485Duncan Ingram ([email protected]) +44 (0)1258 268561Julia Nelepa ([email protected]) +46 733 100 640Subscriptions and CirculationKerry Hill ([email protected])Accounts/Office ManagerKerry Hill +44 (0)20 3463 9486 Group Publishing Director Kevin Borras Group CEO Luis Hillthinkinghighways.comThinking Highways (ISSN 1752-433XI) is published quarterly in March, June, September and December in two editions (Europe/RoW and North America) for £30/€40 (Europe/RoW) and US$60 (North America) per year by H3B Media, 15 Onslow Gardens, Wallington SM6 9QL, UK. This edition is distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831 and additional mailing offices. Periodicals postage paid at New Brunswick, NJ. POSTMASTER: send address changes to Thinking Highways, 17B South Middlesex Avenue, Monroe NJ 08831.Although due care has been taken to ensure that the content of this publication is accurate and up-to-date, the publisher can accept no liability for errors and omissions. Unless otherwise stated, this publication has not tested products or services that are described herein, and their inclusion does not imply any form of endorsement. By accepting advertisements in this publication, the publisher does not warrant their accuracy, nor accept responsibility for their contents. The publisher welcomes unsolicited manuscripts and illustrations but can accept no liability for their safe return.

© 2014 H3B Media Ltd. All rights reserved. The views and opinions of the authors are not necessarily those of H3B Media Ltd. Reproduction (in whole or in part) of any text, photograph or illustration contained in this publication without the written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited. Printed in the UK by The Manson Group

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Thinking Highways is published by H3B Media Ltd. ISSN 1752-433XI

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BPA Worldwide Circulation Statement Jan-June 2013, average total qualified circulation – 19,462

thinkinghighways.com2 Vol 9 No 2 Europe/Rest of the World

CONTENTS Volume 9 Number 2

TECHNOLOGY FEATURES

COLUMNS & SERVICES

4 COVER FEATUREPaul Hutton investigates the changing face of the traffic control centre

14ENFORCEMENTHow a permanent average speed installation is saving lives

1 FOREWORD The “dream team” is back together. Again.

60 ANDRÉ VITS

62 PROF PHIL CHARLES

63 ASECAP: KALLISTRATOS DIONELIS

16 TOLLING A potted history of tolling in Turkey...with a glimpse of the future

18TOLLING The importance of the toll road to the well-being of a developing country

EC PROJECTS & ITS EUROPE FOCUS

44 MALTAKevin Borras talks to Peter Paul Barbara, Malta’s National ITS Coordinator about his country’s ambitious schemes

50ASSET TRACKINGAre Russia’s roads really that unsafe? Not any more, says Semyon Fokin

54GAMIFICATIONWe’re all gamers now – but how is it affecting our travel behaviour?

58TUNNEL SAFETYCésar Bartolomé on the role of concrete in improving fire safety

22POSSEOpen specifications, open source and open data for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration

26FINLAND: VTTFITSRUS is allowing smoother passenger traffic across the Finnish–Russian border

30FINLAND: TRAFFICLABA new public and private sector initiative is creating new possibilities in road traffic services

34FINLAND: FMIHow vehicular networking and road weather services are advancing traffic safety

64 IR2B: JOSÉ PAPÍ

65 IBEC: DR ALAN STEVENS

66 RICHARD BISHOP

67 PAUL HUTTON

68 DR ANDREAS KOSSAK

70 THINKING ALOUD Paul Hutton with the latest news from the Thinking Highways podcast

72 AD INDEXYour guide to finding the advertisers in this issue

38FINLAND: ARCTIC POWERDelivering short-term road weather information to travellers in the north of Finland

42FINLAND: RISTO KULMALAImproving the duration and quality of journeys via evaluation and piloting

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TECHNOLOGY Traffic control rooms

Since Thinking Highways launched in 2006, the role of the traffic control centre has changed. No more do operatives simply observe the traffic conditions on a video wall and act rapidly when incidences on the network occur. The TCC has undergone something of a metamorphosis, as Paul Hutton discovers

Changing rooms

If you’re managing a transport net-work, the chances are you’ll have a control room where at least some

of that management takes place. But for many in the industry, the control room is some sort of mythical place that they rarely see and don’t understand.

So we at Thinking Highways thought we’d investigate what actually happens in a control room in 2014, how responsi-bilities have changed and what the future might look like. I spoke to representa-tives from four leading manufacturers of control room equipment, plus the heads of two control rooms, one in Europe and one in the US.

So let’s meet that European control room manager, first, Esmon George from the London Streets Traffic Control Centre, who explains that, despite it being one of the biggest and busiest cit-ies in the world, London’s control room is actually relatively new:

“The key thing to recognize is that 10 or so years ago London didn’t have a 24/7 control room for the road network. So we started taking over roles and responsibili-ties from the police and other agencies to get involved in both coordinating the impact of planed events and roadworks but also to get a much better handle on traffic management issues, intelligence gathering, situational awareness and so on. I think that collective increase in capability from a standing start has been something of a gestational development over the last decade.”

Jason Sims runs the Kansas City SCOUT traveller information system

in the US, which is unique in that it’s the only municipal traffic management organisation that spans two states, Kansas and Missouri (not very much of Kansas City actually lies in the State of Kansas). I asked him what his controllers do, and what they are tasked with achieving:

“They are responsible for taking calls from all Kansas and Missouri part-ners, which can include the media, law enforcement, fire service, citizens…we do have a complete customer service operation inside the traffic management

centre and we disseminate information out so anything that has to do with traf-fic, anything that blocks a lane, anyone that would need roadside assistance, any maintenance activity for both States, they are populating our traveler information system and they are putting out traveler information on various platforms.

“To run a control room, you need equipment to allow you to monitor the traffic situation through CCTV and sen-sors, plus computers to allow controllers to do their jobs. Jupiter Systems is one of




thinkinghighways.com 5Europe/Rest of the World Vol 9 No 2

Traffic control rooms

the companies that has been providing solutions for control rooms that allows organisations to gather visual informa-tion and display them on video walls and now mobile phones, tablets and laptops as well.”

Brady Bruce is Vice President for mar-keting and strategic alliances at Jupiter, and he says that when it comes to control rooms, it’s all about the bigger picture:

“Those systems allow traffic managers to see camera views of the roadways, to get volumetric data from in-road sen-sors and other types of telemetry that are describing the flow of traffic through a metropolitan area, a state, a province or even across the country. What we are seeing now is the increasing importance of those centres as multiple agencies are looking to coordinate their activities. We are now seeing those very same traffic control rooms being used to coordinate the activities of police, fire and emer-gency management services.”

Activu is a software and service com-pany that makes software enabling network-based visualisation, allowing

people to interact with equipment and each other, to make quick time-critical decisions. Vice President of Product Management, John Stark, says traffic con-trol centres have unique requirements:

“The role of the control room within the traffic industry has been more and more control over changing message signs, understanding what traffic flows are like, making sure they can respond to differing traffic situations and be able to actually manage those traffic flows and more importantly inform the public about what is going on on the roadways. In an emergency situations they need to have contingency plans for things like natural disasters, evacuation plans. If something happens the city can actu-ally move large parts of the populace from one place to another because of an impending natural activity.”

Esmon George explains that some-thing not altogether dissimilar also hap-pens in London:

“We can control half of London’s traffic signals from the control room and that is a lot of capability, coupled with the ability to see a lot of the road network through CCTV and having sharing agreements with local authorities so we can see their CCTV, we can see the national Highways Agency CCTV and although that’s a lot of visibility at any one time, with the right intelligence it does give us the ability to pinpoint issues very quickly.”

Rob Moodey is UK sales account man-ager for Matrox, a company providing equipment for control room walls, opera-tors and the connectivity between them, including introducing dual-head work-stations where operators have more than one screen in front of them. Although he aggress that the role of a control room is often misunderstood, he thinks it’s actu-ally fairly simple:

“I think the clue is in the name! The people there want to influence what’s going on outside of where they are, in other words, to be in control. In some

scenarios you can’t entirely control the events that are happening but you can respond to them and you can try to channel them, so in that sense the room is for situational awareness followed by the control of those resources that you can control. The traffic control room was, and in fact still is, the place where all these information sources are brought together and where the decisions are facilitated and I don’t think that partic-ular aspect has changed since the very beginning.”

STARK REMINDERWhat has changed, according to John Stark, is the requirement for controllers not only to manage the traffic, but also to inform:

“Traditionally there wasn’t so much of a public-facing side to the organization. The reality was that they were bringing a lot of information in but not disseminat-ing it in any way that was actionable to the outside world. I think today there is a very public face to all these traffic man-agement centres – half of their purpose is to provide data to news agencies to allow people to see what their commutes are going to be like and what the traffic situ-ation is going to be like on any given day.”

And in Kansas City Jason Sims is working hard to let the travellers know as much as they can. It certainly offers its citizens a wide range of critical traveler information of a number of platforms.

“We are populating several apps and Statewide maps, we have over 100 mes-sage signs and within two minutes of taking a call we try and get information out to the travelers. That information is automatically going to websites for both States, it’s populating the Kansas City Scout mobile app, it’s populating the City Scout website and we have what we call Traveler Information Alerts where we have 7,000 to 10,000 subscribers and they get real-time information sent directly their phones or computers.”

SHARING THE BURDENBut it’s not only control rooms that now keep drivers informed of traffic

The Great Wall of China: Beijing’s cavernous traffic control centre



conditions. Sat Navs, smart phone apps and private traffic information compa-nies are gathering and distributing infor-mation, and social media allows people to share information with each other. So could we get to a point where we don’t actually need control rooms to manage traffic? Es George isn’t so sure:

“The move towards self-sufficiency is something we are working on, in chang-ing the ethos from road users finding out what the traffic issues are when they get into their car to doing a bit of research before they start their journey but what wouldn’t happen without a traffic con-trol centre is the ability to respond to the unexpected, so whilst you can have a cer-tain amount of self-regulation in terms of decision-making and what journeys they take and where they make them, what they wouldn’t have is the layer on top of that which firstly coordinates the activity and secondly ensure a timely response to ensure services are back to normal.”

And John Stark and Rob Moodey agree we’re nowhere near the point where people can be self-sufficient:

“That does not eliminate the emer-gency situation, says Activu’s Stark, with fires or natural disasters, or actions of one sort or another that require planned activities to occur or plans to be set in stone by the agencies that are oversee-ing those roadways and need to execute

them in coordination with the fire or police departments who are tasked with trying to keep the populace safe or move them in the right direction or not move if necessary. The control room’s function on a day to day basis might have slightly subsided because people now self-serve, however the role is still critical in places where the public simply can’t do that.”

Adds Moody: “Decisions that the indi-vidual travelers make only really relate to their own behaviour – the control room is trying to get a group response rather than an individual one. Individuals are influenced by the suggestions of others, whether that’s traffic announcements over the radio, satnav rerouting or even intelligent road signs that are changing as they are driving. The better this gets, the more effective those individual decisions are going to be. What happens behind those satnav reroutings or dynamic signs may well be algorithmic but it’s still going to emanate from a central traffic man-agement function.”

Brady Bruce confirms that control rooms come into their own in emergency situations:

“What really become important in the decision-making process is having access to the best and most recent infor-mation and that’s the purview of the technology. It’s getting that information to the people that are going to have to

make those critical decisions about how to reroute traffic.”

And he adds that information gathered from sat navs and apps such as Waze just becomes another source to help us man-age the roads better:

“So here we have drivers running an application on their smartphone that’s providing information to them from other drivers on the road but remember that as a use of Waze I am allowing myself to be tracked. Here’s where I am. This is how fast I’m moving. This is how my speed on this particular stretch of road-way compares to others. This generates a tremendous amount of really useful information that could in fact serve the people that aren’t using that application. There’s an increasing interdependency on these crowdsourcing systems and the municipal systems that make both of them more important – not less.”

EFFICIENCY DRIVEBarco delivers video walls, controllers and video wall management software. Strategic Marketing Director Guy van Wijmeersch agrees that people can’t really travel around efficiently without control rooms:

“When we look at real intermodal transportation where we want to go from point A to point B, using for example the bus and then renting a bike and really using all the possibilities, I think there’s still a long way to go. This is a service that a traffic control centre could look at, espe-cially one located in a city where they can go outside of their own traffic medium.”

Bruce maintains that control rooms are now about much more than just

OUR PANELBrady Bruce is Vice President of Marketing & Strategic Alliances at Jupiter Systems; Esmon George, MBE, is Operations Manager at Transport for London; Rob Moodey is Sales Account Manager at Matrox; Jason Sims is Traffic Center Manager at Kansas City Scout; John Stark is Vice President of Product Management at Activu; Guy van Wijmeersch is Director of Strategic Marketing at Barco

“There’s an increasing interdependency on these crowdsourcing systems and the municipal systems that make both of them more important – not less”

Answers for infrastructure and cities.

about increased pollution levels and the resulting changes in traffic control routines. As soon as the NO₂ leveldrops below the threshold again, the red phases at the gatekeeper traffic signals return to normal. This innovative control mechanism makes Potsdam one of the pioneersof environment-sensitive traffic control. For the city,the new traffic system management center (VSMZ)with Sitraffic® Scala is a key tool for the implementationof its clean air plan.

Now the traffic control system in Potsdam does not only take the traffic volume at the traffic signal into account, but also factors in the current nitrogen dioxide levels. Whenever the NO₂ load is too high at any point in the city, selected “gatekeeper” traffic signals respond with extended red phases, slowing down vehicle access to criticalareas. In combination with other environment-sensitivecontrol measures, this improves overall traffic flowand air quality. In addition, message signs inform drivers

Germany’s first environment-oriented traffic control system meters vehicle access and creates coordinated green phases

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managing traffic and that they come into their own when there’s a major incident:

“As traffic becomes more and more complex and as the requirements for gov-ernments to deliver more and more rapid service response, the traffic control room really becomes a centre for the coordina-tion of an entire city’s services or that an entire province might administer so you can imagine a case where a large fire has broken up in a part of town, you have to get a lot of emergency vehicles on site, there are inured people so you have to get ambulances in, you need the police there to control the crowds…and this can be happening during the worst possible moment of the day, which is peak traffic right at the end of a workday. Being able to understand where the traffic is, how to get around it, to reroute the traffic around affected areas and to get the emergency vehicles and required personnel in place as quickly as possible means that there is more than just a requirement to man-age the traffic. Coordination and service delivery is a crucial part of the process.”

Incident detection and management is something that Es George is already working with in London:

“London Streets Traffic Control Centre is part of a wider surface trans-port and traffic operations centre which we call the STTOC and that has three main elements to it. There’s the police control room for traffic and transport policing which works in very close part-nership with Transport for London, called Metrocom; there’s TfL’s control rooms for London buses which oversees the operation of the 8000 or so buses on our road network, Centrecom, and there’s the LSTCC. The three of those operate the three main arms of what is actually an eight-sided structure which is the best way to describe it. On top of that we have what we call the Strategic Coordination Team whose role is to make sure that all the information is going out to the senior leadership team within the organization, together with some external stakeholders. ”

But he says there’s more that could be done, because for example refuse

collection teams can have an effect on traf-fic that could be much better managed:

“They all have set routes and rather large trucks so we know there’s going to be a refuse vehicle on a certain part of the road network at certain times of the day but I have no visibility of that. That would be quite a powerful tool to have an equally I would argue that we don’t know what visibility the refuse collec-tor’s have of network conditions. It may not be economically viable or practical to have vehicles sitting by the side of the road waiting for significant traffic issues to subside, if they are able to do that then they are not adding to the congestion.”

Jason Sims says collaboration has helped in Kansas City:

“Scout is a firm believer that you are only as strong as your relationships so we do have Kansas Highway Patrol located in our centre as well as Kansas City Police Department. Also we have CAD Integration where their computer-aided dispatch is coming directly into our traveler information system and we have that established for six other law enforce-ment agencies. We also have a police and media hotline that comes directly into the traffic management centre so the police departments and media can call in – that number is used very frequently in the rush hours. The last option we have is that we have an interface where we disseminate all of our video to all of our partners. We have approximately 70 part-ners and as part of the application they can type in and communicate directly

with our operators without having to pick up the phone.”

John Stark says that further integration of different agencies is possible, but do the various stakeholders have the will to do it?

“There are non-populated but ready-to-be-enabled emergency operations centres right here in New Jersey, for example, that regularly go through coor-dinated multi-disciplinary activities to make sure that when something occurs information and control and the right chain of commands is in place so every-one knows who to listen to and who to look for for information so they can bet-ter go about their business and serve the community that they are in. The ques-tion is more of a legislative one where in the US, and probably elsewhere, there’s a certain level of distrust in having too much surveillance being provided to the governing body.”

And Guy van Wijmeersch also believes that while conceptually it’s possible, he isn’t quite so sure that it’s desirable:

“Theoretically and technically it’s possible, yes. Does it make sense? I am not so sure. Mainly because keeping an infrastructure up and running, like an electricity grid or a highway, is still going to be an operational task. Will it improve the efficiency of the highway? Yes, but there would have to be a different con-trol room that is focusing on the full cus-tomer experience.”

THE IMPRACTICABILITY OF DECISION-MAKINGWhat’s becoming apparent here is that there are many stakeholders involved in decisions. Jupiter Systems don’t think it’s practical to expect to have all the stake-holders in place at one time when they’re needed, so have used technology to come up with an innovative, remote solution:

“Over the years I found out that whenever I would walk into these fan-tastic control centres and ask a simple question “Is there anyone else who is not in the room today that needs to see this information?” and almost uni-versally the answer was “yes”. It might

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be an important consultant that needs to see what we are seeing today or the centre’s manager is out at a conference across the other side of the country and I’d like him to be able to see the emerg-ing situation we are seeing and get their input. At Jupiter we took all our exper-tise in gathering information and bring-ing it back to the control room in high resolution and allow it to be accessed through other systems anywhere – we wanted to provide ubiquity. We took all that information and now allow users on their smartphones and tablets (both IoS and Android), as well as their lap-tops, to see the same thing, to access the same information that managers back in the control room are able to access and be able to interact with each other. In a control room I can see an emerging situ-ation and I have a manager who should be seeing this but he’s across the country somewhere and now I can send him an invitation to say “Paul, I need you take a look at this – I don’t know where you are or what device you have but our Canvas system does.” He will get an invitation saying “Brady wants to share canvas with you – you accept it and you will see a screen that I have shared with you of one or more visual images. Now we are seeing the same thing we can go one step further and interact. I can circle something with my mouse and you will be able to see that same annotation happening in real time on the screen of your smartphone. I can say that this is the area we are con-cerned about, that we have troubles in this are before and what do you think we should do? You can say “Brady the real issue is over here in the South East and you can circle a different area and we can resolve the problems in real time using live video.”

So if we have the ability to manage things remotely could we, I ask Guy from Barco, would it actually reduce the neces-sity for a control room and let decision-makers work remotely to carry out the functions they currently do within the one location?

“Again, technically you can have these kind of distributed control rooms

but from a social point of view, from a human point of view, I still think there’s a long way to go before people will really want to work in that way. A theory like that needs another 10-15 years before it’s going to happen that we have a virtual control room.”

And while Rob Moodey understands how one or two people can have valuable input remotely, he doesn’t think it’s prac-tical for all decisions to be made that way:

“You have to agree that telepresence is getting better all the time but critical scenarios are not when you want to hear people asking if anyone else can hear a buzzing on the audio or if it’s just them that can’t see the video feed. Those are things that just don’t fit into the crisis way of thinking.”

Similarly, Activu’s John Stark doesn’t think the managers would want it either:

“Although the capability is there and the tools are certainly there, I think the management of the infrastructure still acts in a way that needs people to be con-centrated in one place so that they can work together.”

And Es George says that although he is more than able to have his team working outside of the control room, he wouldn’t like it as the norm:

“We have contingency built into what we do and how we operate so if we had a significant incident and we need to decamp somewhere else we can do that not just through alternative fixed sites but through the connectivity of our key sys-tems. There are issues to deal with – the 3G or 4G network will be under consid-erable strain in a situation like that and

you can’t necessarily rely on data quality to give you a real, workable image. More importantly, while operating remotely is a viable proposition what you do miss is the situational awareness and joined-up activity that your partner area is working on. It’s all solveable, whether it’s through video conferencing or real-time touch pads and so on, but there’s no real sub-stitute for the close proximity of work-ing. When we moved the three control rooms into this one building in 2009 we saw some immediate benefits in co-location, certainly in terms of situational awareness.”

THE STAFF OF LEGENDWithin the control room itself, techno-logical advances are clearly helping the staff do their work more efficiently, as Brady Bruce explains:

“One of those is the increased amount of bandwidth that’s available that allows us to pull more camera feeds and more data feeds throughout geographically dispersed areas back to a control room and to do that in high quality and pro-vide that information in real time…bandwidth has been a profound influ-ence on this. The other is the emergence of IP cameras that allows us to get higher resolution and higher frame rate visual images back to the control room AND do it with less bandwidth than was previ-ously required.”

Guy van Wijmeersch is of the opinion that technology is just making every-thing easier:

“We have put more sensors out there so the monitoring of traffic is just done in a

“Critical scenarios are not when you want to hear people asking if anyone else can hear a buzzing on the audio or if it’s just them that can’t see the video feed”

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better way. Streams of data can now come in using video and it’s much much easier than it used to be. A lot of the cameras are IP cameras and are being monitored in the control room. Secondly there are also better solutions out there that can help us to look at the right picture at the right moment. A lot of decisions are taken through the IP camera – they monitor themselves so they only show the excep-tions. It’s not about showing image from a lot of cameras, it’s about the right ones at the right time.”

Jason Sims says his controllers have an inordinate amount of information to sift through, so having technology to alert them of where to look is vital:

“We have over 350 cameras in Kansas City as well as over 2000 vehicle detec-tion stations (VDS) and we have smart VDS that detect drops in speeds and will alert the operator to look at that loca-tion. We also have two different types of technology on our cameras that take snapshots of anomalies and directly alert our operators. When the operator has the traveler information system up they have the best situational awareness pos-sible. We have had situations prior to this where we did not have this. It’s harder, as the system grows, you only have a certain amount of operators and you must use technology to give the best situational awareness possible and get the best infor-mation in so the operator can get the best information out.”

A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURESo where do we go next? What does the future look like? John Stark and Brady Bruce both think that the first key thing is to better integrate legacy systems:

“Most places have a bunch of disparate systems that aren’t integrated in any way and there’s no plan to integrate them in any way as they are either competitors’ products or just aren’t interoperable and there’s incentive to bring those systems together to provide a unified view of the information, explains John. This is where companies like Activu come into play as we can bring this information together and allow our customers to effectively

integrate and assimilate it in an attrac-tive way and then share that assimilated view with others in their organization. This layer that sits on top of all these systems plays a very important role in control rooms across a variety of vertical industries and as the network becomes more and more important companies like us, and some of our big competitors, are going to be very well placed to take advantage of that.

“We have more cameras that are posi-tioned around metropolitan areas, says Brady, and there are more sensors built into roadways and other parts of the city, all of which provides information. Transparency becomes the watchword. The goal is to coordinate all the infor-mation coming in from these disparate systems, making sense of it and apply-ing some of the big data technology that can look at what is basically unstructured data and connect meaning to it – the meaning is what leads to planning, both on the part of the transportation manag-ers and on behalf of the traveler. I think we get better as cities, states, provinces and countries by making more informa-tion available, extracting more meaning from the information and then simply as citizens, having access to that informa-tion so we can plan the services we need to consume in terms of transportation.”

As a controller actually using the sys-tem, Jason Sims has a wishlist:

“I’d say tweaking the algorithm, tweak-ing the technology in order to have

customizable areas so that there are less false positives. We would love the vendors to try and continue develop-ing cameras to increase the ability to do accurate counts. If you have accurate counts coming from cameras they can minimize the need for deploying detec-tion…I just think that it’s very important when you are looking at urban areas to also consider technology for the rural areas as well. Kansas City Scout manages over 400 miles of rural Interstate span-ning two states – some of the technology is applicable for urban areas but not so applicable for rural…if we could keep a good focus on the rural areas and proce-dures for incident management that are so important, that would really push the TMC operations all across the country to another level.”

Rob Moodey concludes this article and accompanying documentary pod-cast with a cautionary word of warn-ing regarding the difference between peak and average performance require-ments. His concern is that as budgets are squeezed and technology is more relied upon, the human influence will be diminished which will be fine most of the time, but on rare occasions will cause enormous problems:

“The challenge is the cost of “Just In Case” capacity. Do you really need to invest in something that will only be used one year out of seven? You might make that analysis if you are choosing to buy an extra snow plough but if it’s capacity in the control room dealing with all the information that’s going to flow in during a crisis it’s too late to not have the capacity by that point. The only people who won’t feel the pain then are the accountants.”

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Paul Hutton is Head of H3B Media’s

Broadcast Services Division

[email protected]

For the audio version please visit http://thinkinghighways.com/category/podcasts/

Thanks to all the contributors who took part in this article.

Control centre operatives have an inordinate amount of information to process, so having technology to alert them where to look is vital

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TECHNOLOGY Speed enforcement

In 2012 Nottinghamshire, UK, installed a SPECS3 average speed camera system on the A614, monitoring traffic along 21km of single carriageway road. The solution was chosen because previous installations of SPECS cameras had consistently delivered improved safety and traffic flows, which were key objectives for this route. Geoff Collins takes up the story two years on

Untangling Notts

The A614 is a former trunk road linking the city of Nottingham with the A1. It is maintained to

a high standard and features a wide, single carriageway with several cen-tral right turn features into local side roads. The route has many bends and hills with no footway for most of its length and is one of the busiest non-trunk roads in the county. Before the SPECS cameras were installed, the A614 had a significant casualty history with 289 people killed or injured in a five- year period. Nottinghamshire County Council undertook a programme to address this unfortunate record with the support of the–then road safety minister Mike Penning together with the local MP and senior county councillors.

TECHNOLOGYThe A614 is monitored by a SPECS3 POD (Portable Outstation Device) installation, supplied by Vysionics. Blue

SPECS camera columns each hold two SPECS3 cameras, with one camera mon-itoring the northbound and the other monitoring the southbound traffic.

These two cameras are connected back to a roadside cabinet, containing a SPECS3 POD. The POD contains a 3G SIM card that wirelessly communicates back to a remote ERCU (offence server), located at the Nottinghamshire Police offices. Because the A614 is mostly an unlit road, a number of infra-red (IR) lighting columns were installed; this allows the capture of a well-defined image on a completely dark road.

SPEED MONITORINGThe primary purpose of a SPECS installa-tion is usually to manage vehicle speeds, thus reducing the likelihood and sever-ity of collisions and casualties. The A614 has three loop sites within the SPECS monitored zone, which allowed an accu-rate comparison of vehicle speeds before

and after the SPECS installation. This provided some very useful and interest-ing data, which helps to explain exactly why SPECS is such an effective casualty reduction tool.

ILLUMINATION AND NIGHT TIME IMAGES

Night time image from the A614. Note that the image is greyscale, but the vehicle’s plate is still clearly visible.

CHANGES IN DRIVER BEHAVIOURAs a quick summary, SPECS works because it changes the way people think and drive. Through a greater awareness of the speed limit, and the fear that they may receive a fine/points, the vast major-ity of drivers keep their speed to very near the posted speed limit. This effect is shown on the two charts below, which both come from loop data, covering peri-ods before and after the SPECS cameras were installed.

The charts (left) show vehicle speeds seen at two times; in January 2012, which was shortly before the SPECS cameras were installed and in January 2013,

The ‘pre-installation’ chart shows a significant difference between the speeds seen at night and speeds during the day. This is largely because there is very little traffic at night, so drivers tend to speed more.

The ‘post-installation’ chart clearly demonstrates how speeds have become much more uniform, or harmonised. The night profile is virtually the same as the day profile, demonstrating that regardless of traffic volumes, vehicles are travelling at just below the posted speed limit.


Speed enforcement

exactly one year later and finally, several months after installation was completed. Data is shown for three periods:• 24hr (all vehicles over a 24hr period)• Peak (all vehicles in the most busy

hour)• Night (only vehicles seen between

22:00 and 04:00)

The vertical red line shows the speed limit – data to the right relates to speed-ing vehicles

The ‘pre-installation’ chart shows a significant difference between the speeds seen at night and speeds during the day. This is largely because there is very little traffic at night, so drivers tend to speed more. The ‘post-installation’ chart clearly demonstrates how speeds have become much more uniform, or harmo-nised. The night profile is virtually the same as the day profile, demonstrating that regardless of traffic volumes, vehi-cles are travelling at just below the posted speed limit.

SPEED VARIABILITY (SD – STANDARD DEVIATION OF VEHICLE SPEED)Probably the most significant reason behind the effectiveness of SPECS cam-eras is the impact it has on speed variabil-ity, or more accurately, the reduction in the standard deviation of vehicle speed.

Before the cameras were installed, the SD rose above 10mph during the night, showing there was a very large speed dif-ferential between the fastest and slow-est vehicles using the road, at the same time. Post installation, the SD remains between 4 and 6mph. High variability is more likely to result in collisions, which obviously has an impact on casualties but also traffic congestion.

CASUALTY REDUCTIONSThe primary purpose of a permanent SPECS installation is usually casualty reduction. A study of previous installa-tions shows that without exception, the casualty rates always drop significantly. The formal measure of this is the Killed or Seriously Injured (KSI) figure. It is still early days to review this fully for the A614, as the post installation data only covers 16 months, compared to five years of pre installation data. However, before installation, on average 1.8 fatali-ties occurred per year. Post installation, no fatalities have occurred and the KSI figure has dropped by 53.1 per cent.

WIDER BENEFITSSPECS average speed cameras have now been operated throughout the UK on every available speed limit. Whilst the primary purpose of a SPECS installation is usually to reduce casualties and their

associated impact, through experience from 300+ projects, Vysionics has also identified further benefits:Smoother traffic flows: Because speed variability is reduced, with traffic travel-ling at a common or harmonised speed, traffic flows tend to be better. This results in reduced congestion and a more reli-able journey time. The reasons behind this are similar to Managed Motorways, where variable speed limits are used to maximise the capacity of a motorway. With a uniform speed, more vehicles can fit onto the road and a conveyor belt type flow is more consistent.Greener environment: Travelling at a sensible, steady speed burns less fuel and results in lower emissions. In addition, this means that engine and road noise are reduced, along with less wear on the road surface. Air quality and emissions are an increasingly important issue for the government, so this benefit will become increasingly important.Fairer and more acceptable: The trav-elling public accept that average speed enforcement is a fairer enforcement solution, because drivers aren’t caught ‘unawares’ through a momentary lack of judgement. In addition, because journey reliability improves, many drivers actu-ally welcome the use of our technology because their drive to work will become more predictable.

Sonya Hurt is the Casualty Reduction Manager for Nottinghamshire County Council. Of the benefits of the SPECS approach, she said:

“The SPECS installations are proving year on year to be a known and effec-tive method of reducing casualties both countywide and nationwide. Where these cameras have been used elsewhere in the county, there has been an 80 per cent reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured”.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Geoff Collins is Sales & Marketing

Director at Vysionics ITS Ltd

[email protected]

www.vysionics.com

SPECS3 is widely used in Nottinghamshire in the UK

“SPECS works because it changes the way people think and drive”


TECHNOLOGY Electronic toll collection

Emrihan Ozdemir takes a brief but fascinating look at the history of tolling – and Turkey’s unique place in it

Clear recent history

Tolling on highways is a necessity in today’s world, largely because of the fact that a highway with

driver-friendly physical and techno-logical conditions is not easy to main-tain without any return of investment. Providing drivers with highways of high-est quality, while pleasing them in terms of affordable toll rates, may be the key point among the fundamentals of oper-ating a toll road.

Tollways are constructed considering the overall traffic flow as a basis. The first aim is to lower the complication at intense traffic zones. The first tollway was opened in 1921 in South Berlin, Germany, was called AVUS and was 9km long, yet this road was not open to daily vehicle traffic and was just being

used as racetrack. On the other hand, the first tollway which was open to daily vehicle traffic had been initiated in Italy connecting Milano and Como, in 1924. After 1925, government and private sec-tor members in Germany quickly started to construct tollways all over the coun-try and then the trend started to spread around the World. The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, the road that connects Europe to Asia, was actually a stretch of the first tollway in Turkey, which was opened in 1973.

BACK TO THE PRIMITIVEBefore the last decade, tolling was per-formed by human operators at cash-desks – a largely primitive solution to the problem of how money will be collected

from drivers traveling on these costly highways. An increasing number of vehi-cles showed up with uncalculated and unexpected problems which urgently needed to be solved. One of the most sig-nificant of these problems was the traffic congestion at the tollbooths on account of the long queues. Entrance with mag-netic tapes given by dispensers at entry lanes and tolling with these tapes at exit lanes was the first attempt to reduce the traffic congestion occuring around the tollbooth, but it was not enough to com-pletely clear the congestion. Later, when ITS technology had become more wide-spread, tolling began to be executed by prepaid smartcards at entry and exit lanes which required drivers to make two stops at entry and exit gates. This helped a little bit, but it was still was not enough.

There was now a pressing need for a combination of tolling methods that would enable users not to stop at entry and exit gates but to pay on the move. This sounded a little bit unlikely as up to that point there was no technology which could make such a practice even remotely possible. However, thanks to the invention of Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tech-nologies, the tolling world has been revolutionised. It allowed drivers to pay their toll at up to 40km/h without having to stop at a barrier or slow to a halt and hand over some coins. First, DSRC tech-nology was used to allow tolling without pausing at tollbooths. The results were satisfactory and congestion was lowered to acceptable levels. DSRC was good, but even that wasn not enough for ensuring it was the technology of the future.

Compared with Passive RFID tags, DSRC transponders were expensive, too bulky and not adequately eligible The Bosphorous Bridge was a stretch of the first tollway in Turkey which opened in 1973


Electronic toll collection

“An increasing number of vehicles showed up with uncalculated and unexpected problems which urgently needed to be solved”

for in-motion reading and by this stage prepaid Passive RFID tags had begun to be used in tolling projects. One of the first Passive RFID applications for elec-tronic tolling in the world, was launched by Turkish company Vendeka IT Ltd in September 2012 on all highways and Bosphorus bridges in Turkey; this was called the ‘Fast Passing System’. The motto of the project was to enable users to pass faster along toll lanes. It worked and today passive RFID solutions for electronic toll-ing projects have become widespread.

Vendeka made a splash with Europe’s biggest and most successful Passive RFID Electronic Toll Collection Project (HGS) on Turkey’s highways and bridges (Bosphorus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet) passing through Istanbul which connect Asia to Europe. The overall system archi-tecture of a passive RFID electronic toll

collection project is shown in the flow chart below.

Vendeka has been integrating new passive RFID technology within the scope of any toll/fare collection project independent from whatever the project requirements are. The primary goal is to be the key integrator when consider-ing any kind of electronic toll collec-tion project. Within the scope of this goal, they’re integrating custom solu-tions which may be used on any kind of vehicle. In addition, Vendeka also cre-ates particular solutions for any specific target group. For example, GNSS can be used for tolling of trucks or vehicles such as half-tracks or logistics trucks. GNSS is used for electronic tolling by evaluating the position and checkpoint entry-exit data. It is not suitable for personal auto-mobile usage, because of the fact that the

in-built GPS system to be mounted in cars is not particularly cost-effective for end-users and it’s also not consistent with the principle of privacy.

Vendeka specialises in custom-designed Passive RFID ETC solutions that are appropriate for any kind of vehi-cle. Turkey’s Passive RFID ETC system integrated by Vendeka also has the dis-tinction of being the first ETC project that enables the tolling of any kind of vehicle using the highway, so that opera-tors maintain maximum profit margins while at the same time sustaining cus-tomer satisfaction.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| A. Emirhan Ozdemir is Business

Development Engineer at Vendeka

www.vendeka.com.tr

System architecture of a passenger RFID ETC project


TECHNOLOGY Toll roads

Traditionally, the roads in Russia have not only been routes for transportation of people and

vehicles, but a certain life philosophy. In the modern world, the meaning of roads has perhaps lost the symbolical implica-tion, but has at the same time gained an important economical and social status: a developed region has an extensive net-work of modern roads. But the question arises: “What is a modern road?”

Until quite recently, the very existence of a route between point A and point B had been a good sign – an asphalted road without potholes was the ultimate goal.

However, in 2014 a smooth surface and clear markings are not a surprise anymore. New demands emerge with the increasing number of vehicles, and the

industry faces new standards – the stand-ards of Intelligent Transport Systems. Construction of new roads equipped with contemporary ITS systems is now one of the most relevant tasks in Russia. The example of European countries proves that ITS can successfully solve a number of problems connected with the growth of transport flow intensity, positively influencing accident-free driving, increasing the effectiveness of infrastructure usage and diminishing environmental pollution.

To ensure the maximum possibili-ties for ITS development, it is vital that the roads are as sustainable as possible. One way to achieve that is by introduc-ing a toll system within an ITS frame-work. The introduction of toll roads

Dmitriy Plotnikov on the importance of toll roads, and roads in general, to the overall well-being of a developing country

Another level


Toll roads

“The results have exceeded all expectations as the collection of tolls allowed for more active development of the road infrastructure”

can significantly increase the economic effects, connected with the lowering of haulage costs, transport companies prof-its increase, an an improvement in the quality and convenience of roads.

The State now also has the opportunity to develop road infrastructure and toll-ing affords it the potential to make ITS autonomous, subsidy-free and also lay the foundation for the system’s evolution.

BREAKING NEW GROUNDOne of the first companies in Russian ITS market was Techno-Traffic. Since the very beginning it was clear that the com-plexity of implementing and managing ITS programmes requires a technically complex approach: scientific, engineer-ing, design and construction.

The company’s experts have analysed a significant part of some of the leading international experience of system imple-mentation, accounted for elements with a particular advantage for the Russian culture and discarded those steps and technologies that might prove problem-atic from the point of view of climate and mentality.

In the course of working on sev-eral projects it was possible to define, conceptually formalize and introduce Automated Traffic Management systems called “Magistral” and “Gorod”.

As a result, in December 2010, the company successfully launched the first Russian toll road, a tolled section of Federal Route M-4 “Don”, on km 414-464 in the Lipetsk region. The drivers appre-ciated the advantages of the toll road – convenience, higher speed of transit, less time spent spent in traffic. The original speed limit was 90 km/h, but in June 2011 it was raised up to 110 km/h.

The first experience of operation

allowed the company and its experts and technicians to widen its knowledge base and perfect the solutions.

The results have exceeded all expec-tations as the collection of tolls allowed for more active development of the road infrastructure and increased financ-ing of the existing roads. According to the results of State company “Russian Highways” activities, “in 2013, over 26m

drivers have used the toll sectors of the Federal route M-4 “Don”. Of those 70 per cent (18.2m) were passenger vehicles and 30 per cent (7.8m) trucks. The amount of finance to come due to tolling in 2013 equalled 1.46 billion roubles (€32m)”.

DIAMETRICALLY PROPOSEDSince 2010, the experts of Techno-Traffic have been putting into practice their experience in toll road construction and Automated Traffic Control systems in the designing of the Western High Speed Diameter in Saint-Petersburg, on the Southern and Northern sectors.

A peculiar feature of this highway is that this is a strategical investment project of the city of Saint-Petersburg, defining the development of the city as a transport cluster of international standard, thus creating the shortcut between Southern and Northern regions. Creating and exploiting systems on such a scale demands a complex set of


TECHNOLOGY Toll roads

interconnected tasks and the company have been very successful in execut-ing them due to having well-developed generic technical, organizational and legal solutions, adapted to various social-economical, infrastructure, climatic and other conditions.

Upon construction of the first toll sta-tions, the company experimented with implementing typically European sys-tems, but then faced certain difficulties, associated with the specifics of the con-struction and operation of Russia’s road infrastructure. Because of that, the deci-sion was made to opt for the first Russian tolling system RUTOLL.

RUTOLL allows for the taking into account Russian specifics regarding bank and tax legislation, minimizes the impor-tance of the human factor and automates the cashier-operator’s work. The impor-tant point, founded in the ideology of RUTOLL, is the interoperability – the possibility of integration with both the subsystems of the line level (license plate recognition, weigh-in-motion systems) and the systems of the dispatch centers.

In cooperation with the Institute for Information Transmission a unique automatic vehicle video-classification system was designed and implemented. The principle of video-classification is based on the analysis of video-flow with the use of computer-vision technology.

SYSTEMATIC, AUTOMATICIn the field of Automated Traffic Control systems, Techno-Traffic has imple-mented projects within the most promi-nent in the country: • The Third Transport Ring (in coopera-

tion with Siemens);• Federal route M-4 “Don”;• Ring Road, St Petersburg;• Western High Speed Diameter,

St Petersburg;• Alternate Federal route М1 “Belarus”;• Olympic facilities, Sochi

General management and coordination of all interconnected systems takes place in Traffic Management Centres, where the information on the traffic situation is collected, stored, processed and the com-munication with the road users is car-ried out. Along the length of all the toll sectors equipped with the traffic man-agement systems (including toll sectors)

vehicle safety is kept under close scrutiny. Advanced methods of design engineering allows for solving both global and local problems in design and survey work in the transport industry, and it also means that losses, both human and transport-related, are diminishing rapidly.

The strategic goal of the company is simple – the introduction of a new level of road infrastructure, thus creating a global standard for traffic safety and driver comfort on the roads of Russia.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Dmitriy Plotnikov is vice-president

of Techno-Traffic

[email protected]

www.technotraffic.ru

Thanks to Julia Nelepa for translating the original Russian article into English

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EC PROJECTS POSSE

Open specifications, open source and open data for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, by Eirik Skjetne and Hans Westerheim

Leading from the front

Norway is a relatively small country and therefore offers a small market for the ITS industry. This has led to monopolistic developments in the supplier

market. The major suppliers easily become dominant in the market and it becomes very hard for new and smaller com-petitors to secure contracts. These are unwanted market con-ditions and can lead to an increase in the prices.

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) is responsible for the planning, construction and operation of the national and major urban road networks including infor-mation services and all traffic management. Management of the national legal framework and recommendations for road transport are also under the responsibility of the NPRA. As the main buyer of ITS and other road equipment in Norway, NPRA is responsible for supporting and developing a sound and competitive market with fair prices. The underlying challenge in doing this is a combination of a lack of compe-tence on the buyers’ side and the fact that the total size of the market is too small to be interesting for suppliers.

OPEN SOLUTIONSNPRA has developed different approaches to meet these challenges:• Using open standards and international standardisation,

on the one hand• Developing a national set of specifications, on the other.

When the international market becomes mature it normally also develops either common international standards (CEN, ISO etc) or de facto industry standards that are used by the industry. The market is international and the prices are set internationally. The whole industry normally supports the solutions and the interfaces, which again is securing interop-erability between solutions from the different suppliers.

The standardisation process is however extensive and often very slow. Experience has shown that it cannot keep up with the fast pace of development of new technology. To meet this challenge it is helpful for the buyers to define their own specifications. The specification might be techni-cally very specific, but such specifications are not normally

open for the required innovation. One might end up buy-ing the technology of yesterday. Therefore functional speci-fications are preferable; i.e. NPRA describes the objectives including all necessary interfaces leaving the technical solutions to the industry.

PRACTICAL EXPERIENCESThese open solutions (using open standards and international standardisation and development of a national set of specifica-tions) have been tried out in Norway. NPRA started the devel-opment of electronic tags for tolling in 1986. The need came from the introduction of urban tolling schemes. The develop-ment of the system was carried out by the Norwegian com-pany MicroDesign AS (known since 1998 as Q-Free ASA).

It was technically a very advanced system, but there was only one supplier of the system. Some years later, the new 5.8GHz DSRC standard was approved in CEN. NPRA

The NPRA’s use of open standards and international standards as well as national specifications will help develop and support a sound and competitve market with fair prices


POSSE

“Functional specifications are preferable; i.e. NPRA describes the objectives including all necessary interfaces leaving the technical solutions to the industry”

decided to convert all Norwegian tolling systems to the new standard. This was put in practice with the development of a new national specification for electronic tolling, AutoPASS. AutoPASS is a detailed technical specification for tolling systems including tags, roadside equipment and back-office processing. The specification is open, but owned by NPRA. It has led to the development of a tolling equipment market with several competitive suppliers and a substantial decrease in prices. As such this has been a success story, but the AutoPASS specification is not open for much innovation and new technologies. This is the drawback with detailed techni-cal demands in the standard.

In another project, NPRA has worked together with the other Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland) to develop a common technology for traffic monitor-ing, the NORSIKT-project. One major reason for the project was to open the market for this kind of equipment. Each country had developed its own equipment in the 1980-90. By cooperating in common specifications and testing procedures the countries wanted to establish a substantially larger market for suppliers of traffic monitoring equipment. These specifica-tions are functional and only describe monitoring demands and interfaces that the equipment must fulfil.

Last year Norway launched the first tender for a new gen-eration monitoring equipment based on this specification.

The experience so far is that the prices have dropped by nearly 50 per cent.

OVERALL INTEROPERABILITY FRAMEWORKTo secure interoperability and reuse of equipment NPRA has been engaged in developing a reference system archi-tecture, or an overall framework for interoperability. The ARKTRANS framework was developed as a multi-modal framework to support the development of ITS systems in 1999. There has been great interest in this framework and it has been really helpful in defining overall and generic roles and responsibility related to ITS. Attempts to use the frame-work as a supporting tool also in commercial projects and product development have been done with varying success. The framework has proven good in system development in R&D-projects, but it has been difficult to convert this to detailed technical system design.

One of the main challenges is to be able to relate the overall definitions supporting interoperability to the needs present when working with technical interoperability. NPRA has realised that the technical development itself will remain outside the control of NPRA, and there is there-fore a need to be able to link fast technology development with the more stable overall concepts and functions in the ARKTRANS framework.

NPRA has learned that both UK (UTMC) and German speaking countries (OCIT/OTS) have been working with national system specifications. The background being very much similar to the one described in Norway. The two national-oriented initiatives were launched over a decade ago to overcome the closed-system nature of traffic man-agement and ITS. Polis, the European network of cities and regions for innovative transport solutions, invited both ini-tiatives to a Polis members meeting in 2010 in order to learn more about them and to ascertain the interest of cities and regions elsewhere in Europe in the open systems approach. The meeting revealed that the problems of system fragmen-tation, vendor lock-in and market monopoly are widespread throughout the continent. This led to the POSSE project (www.openits-posse.eu) supported by the EU’s INTERREG IVC programme.

The main aim of POSSE is to raise awareness of the need for open specifications and standards and to share the experiences of existing open system frameworks in Europe. A central objective of the project is to build the capacity


EC PROJECTS POSSE

will include workshops coordinating the core activities and especially, of relevance to POSSE, workshops directly focus-ing on the framework/architecture. Representatives from the UK and German open systems frameworks will be involved in some of these workshops.

THE WAY FORWARDCommon open specifications and standards are impor-tant for deployment of ITS. The total public budget for ITS investments is relatively fixed at the moment. By opening up the ITS market, road authorities can install and develop more systems to the benefit of the transport sector. The work with open systems and specifications will therefore contrib-ute strongly to the objectives of the European ITS Action Plan about faster deployment of ITS.

NPRA has defined this as an important element in the updated ITS strategy of 2012. We believe in cooperation to develop these open systems together with the supplier indus-try. A larger market will lead to greater innovation and utili-sation of new technology and deliver better systems.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Eirik Skjetne is Head of ITS at the Norwegian Public

Roads AdministrationHans Westerheim works at the Department of Software Engineering, Safety and Security at SINTEF

www.posse-openits.eu/

of transport authorities to implement open specifications and standards. In addition, POSSE is drawing up a good practice guide for the implementation of open specifica-tions and standards.

Through its involvement in POSSE, NPRA is learning more about how to develop a common specification frame-work for ITS. There is a strong belief that the market for ITS will benefit greatly if Europe can develop common and open specifications. This will give more value for the taxpayer’s and road user’s money. NPRA’s main activity in POSSE involves defining and specifying the functionality of an ITS station with the help of ARKTRANS.

Our main goal is that specifications for the ITS station should be compatible with the UTMC and OCIT/OTS speci-fications. The ITS station shall cover a wide range of uses: from quite simple data collection at the roadside to being an element in data distribution in cooperative systems. The expectation is that the ITS station will work well with open standards like OPC – UA (Open Processing Communication – Unified Architecture), and DATEX II, standards/specifica-tions for data exchange between traffic centres, service pro-viders, traffic operators and media partners.

The POSSE activity forms one of three core activities in the development of the ITS station. The other two main activities will be the definition of technology specifications inside the ITS station and the establishment of a structure/methodology linking architecture/framework and technol-ogy/ specifications closer together. The development work

“There is a strong belief that the market for ITS will benefit greatly if Europe can develop common and open specifications”

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COUNTRY FOCUS: Finland

Karri Rantasila and Matti Lankinen on FITSRUS, the project that facilitates smoother passenger traffic across the Finnish–Russian border

Flow mechanics

The FITSRUS (Helsinki–St. Petersburg Smart Trans–port Corridor) project promotes smoother traffic flows, enhanced safety, environment friendliness,

and improved services in smart transport corridor between Helsinki, the Finnish capital and St. Petersburg, Russia, cov-ering all modes of transport.

In the first phase new services are introduced for pas-sengers, car drivers and public transport. Development of the VEDIA Multi-Service concept, led by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Vediafi Ltd, brings together newly opened mobile services that will result in smoother passenger traffic across the Finnish–Russian border.

Road traffic between Finland and Russia is very busy and has been constantly growing. The amount of crossings of the Finnish-Russian border grew 13 per cent in 2012 with a total number of crossings of 12 million. The road between Helsinki and St. Petersburg (E18) is a part of the pan-Euro-pean network (TEN-T) and it is developed actively both in Finland and Russia. Key problems for border crossers have been identified, including roaming charges and reliability of operation, poor accessibility of weather and driving condi-tion information throughout the journey, and poor usability and availability of services in various languages. These issues

arose in the survey conducted among border crossers, par-ticularly Russians.

Cooperation between Russian and Finnish public and private stakeholders is also crucial for deploying services. Several key actors are involved to FITSRUS project from both sides including ministries, research institutions, major companies, and authorities. The roots of this cooperation were established between Finnish and Russian Governments in 2011 with Memorandum of Understanding. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) was further appointed as a prior-ity area of Transport Policy and Intelligent Transport System strategy and development in both countries. In addition, a General Plan for Smart Transport Corridor Development was accepted by Finnish and Russian Ministries of Transport in August 2012.

STEP FORWARDThe first steps towards realizing the multi-service concept for ITS services in Finland had already been taken in R&D projects that kicked off in the spring of 2009. The main goal of these projects was to develop necessary functional specifi-cations, business models, legal and institutional frameworks and architectures for key ITS services. Later on the work

26 Vol 9 No 2 Europe/Rest of the Worldthinkinghighways.com


FITSRUS

“The main goal of these projects was to develop necessary functional specifications, business models, legal and institutional frameworks and architectures for key ITS services”

Europe/Rest of the World Vol 9 No 2

continued with actual development of the services, related proof-of-concepts and final Multi-Service architecture for mobility services in FITSRUS project.

The VEDIA Multi-Service is a key element of FITSRUS pilots, which were launched in Spring 2014. VEDIA Multi-Services are available to road and railway transport users, but will later also cover travel chains using other forms of transport. First to be introduced are automatic services for road weather and driving conditions, an automatic system issuing bulletins and warnings on traffic disruption, a real-time traffic and congestion information service, and a public transport information service.

For those travelling by train, the VEDIA services will become available in the fast Allegro trains travelling between Helsinki and St. Petersburg. The services will be imple-mented on the Finnish National Railway Company VR Group Ltd on-board wireless Internet, and are available to all train passengers via smart phones and mobile devices. VEDIA train services provide passengers with additional information on journey progress, train station bulletins, news headlines, weather information, and connecting traf-fic data at the destination. The VEDIA services will be pro-duced on board the train, and are therefore unaffected by

poor reception, particularly in the border zone. All services are delivered to end-users via multi-service platform based on HTML5 based VEDIA Multi-Service.

In the VEDIA Multi-Service, the problems associated with roaming will be reduced by making the Internet connec-tion and VEDIA services available free of charge on board Allegro trains and at the Vaalimaa border crossing station. The Russian Yandex-Money payment solution will enable unlimited data use with the Finnish teleoperator DNA Ltd’s prepaid subscription SIM (Subscriber Indentity Module) cards on VEDIA’s SIM card top-up service. There are also plans for developing a similar service for those travelling to Russia.

INFORMATION EXCHANGEThe solution is based on data exchange in which coopera-tion is being built between the authorities and enterprises in both countries. This will allow traffic and road condition information to be made available to consumers, for example, via Rajaliikenne.fi, which is the information service for road users and VEDIA applications. Other additions to the VEDIA Multi-Service will include an online translation service and public transport information that will introduce connecting

27thinkinghighways.com



“Other additions to the VEDIA Multi-Service will include an online translation service and public transport information that will introduce connecting traffic as part of the application”

traffic as part of the application. In addition to this, VEDIA’s mobile SMS payment system can be used, for example, to pay for single tickets in rail traffic within Helsinki.

There are many possibilities to expand multi-service con-cept from services piloted in the first phase. As current

pilots are focused on cross-border passenger traffic mainly on rail and road, plan is to expand services

to cover other transport modes and extended transport corridors, for example via E18 Road

and towards Moscow direction in the east and to Western Finland. The concept can be also multiplied to other major international corridors.

A key for successful piloting is a seam-less cooperation between different stake-holders and funding organizations in both countries. Also the work done in research projects cannot be over addressed as les-sons learned and background work has

provided a solid base for deployment of services. The project will be implemented

in cooperation between public and pri-vate organizations in Finland and Russia. In

Finland, the responsible party is the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Other parties also

closely involved in service implementation include the Finnish Transport Agency and the Finnish Transport

Safety Agency Trafi. A service consortium has been established to imple-

ment the services, including about a dozen companies both in Finland and Russia. The implementing is managed by Vediafi Ltd and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. VEDIA Multi-Services are available at www.vedia.fi and will be introduced at the ITS Europe 2014 conference, to be held in Helsinki in June.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Karri Rantasila is Key Account Manager at VTT

Technical Research of FinlandMatti Lankinen is Chairman of the Board at Vediafi Ltd

[email protected]

www.vtt.fiwww.vedia.fi www.rajaliikenne.fi www.trafi.fi

Main services included in the Vedia service are:• Weather –services

• Road services, help for car travelers (provider: Falck)

• Connecting traffic & public transportation information

• Translation services / RUS-FIN

• Travel insurance purchase functionality (mandatory for travellers)

• Road info, fastest route over border

• Border queue information

• Shell & ST1 station locations

• Wi-Fi hotspot on border

• SIM card top-up, prepaid subscription provided by DNA

• Mobile data access

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A new public and private sector initiative is creating new possibilities in road traffic services. Eemil Rauma and Elias Pöyry reveal all

The internet of traffic

New possibilities are arising from the emerging revo-lution in personal transport. The efficiency leap brought by IT to other sectors of society has yet to be

experienced in road traffic, which is one of the largest busi-nesses in the world. The Finnish authorities and companies together with international companies are looking to bridge this market gap with an innovative project. The Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications has launched an experimental project on electronic transport services for 2014–2015 together with industry players, a pilot to activate the market for applications and services in road traffic, which goes under the name Traffic lab. Here the role of IT is to inte-grate road traffic more strongly with other transport modes and to embed it in a smart environment and infrastructure.

THE CHANGE TOWARDS “TRAFFIC AS A SERVICE”The value of Finnish transport markets alone is €50 bil-lion from which households and companies are paying the lion’s share. Given this huge market, even small efficiency improvements can bring substantial savings to companies, consumers and to the public sector. For example in the metropolitan area of Helsinki almost 40 per cent of the time the delivery cars and trucks are is consumed by searching for unloading and loading places.

The rising costs of transport services guaranteed in the law to the elderly, handicapped and other groups are increasing constantly whereas the solvency of the public sector is diminishing. This causes a dire need to improve

Kutsuplus, which operates at main urban area of the city of Helsinki, is a new kind of demand-based public transport service which combines the benefits of bus and taxi into a single service


Traffic lab

the efficiency of these services. The best way to do this is by bringing novel solutions from the IT side to road traffic. By introducing the Traffic lab project, the ministry aims to tests new electronic services and new operating models for road transport in cooperation with other authorities and the private sector.

This paves the way for a change towards “traffic as a serv-ice”, a model based on a new kind of demand by consum-ers. This is an inevitable path of traffic evolution as services are moving towards a “pay how you drive principle”. Market forecasts predict that up to 50 per cent of vehicle insurance payment schemes in 2020 will be based on actual use and at the same time usage-based pricing will be adopted for both vehicle leasing charges and car loans.

A MOVING REVOLUTIONAs mobile Internet, positioning systems and a host of serv-ices and applications are becoming an integral part of road traffic, they also open doors for a larger paradigm shift. This enables the consumers to choose the best way to move from place to place and the companies to provide these services. All this is enabled by the “Internet of Traffic” that is the key to new services. Whilst the setup and technology are simple and foreseeable, the Internet of traffic will revolutionize the way we move. It will include • Mobile broadband • Navigation • New handy interfaces • New services

As the technology is evolving, so are our experiences as consumers. We demand more and more from our cars and nowadays the most important factor in selecting a new car isn’t the old power and acceleration figures or energy effi-ciency, but vehicle connectivity to the outside world and the onboard technology options1. Cars are evolving into an important media consumption channel and becoming a new part of our everyday connected devices. We spend around 90 minutes a day in traffic and as new technologies make the interaction between users, vehicle and environment pos-sible, it grants the users the access to social media, games and interactivity with the surroundings. This brings entertain-ment in cars to a whole new level and is part of the more general trend of gamification. Connected cars are gaining

growing market shares in western counties. This is also backed up by government regulation, which requires cars to be fitted with e-Call or positioning systems depending on the country and region.

GOALS OF TRAFFIC LABTraffic lab combines the best of both worlds by bringing the private and the public sector to work together in creating something new and valuable – services that make your per-sonal transportation easy, smart and ecological. Finland has a long history in successful “public-private-partnership” and this is a definite advantage in making the phrase “Finland is Traffic lab” come true.

The project has four goals:• Ignition of the consumer market for traffic applications. The project aims to promote consumer markets in elec-

tronic transport services and to analyze impacts the serv-ices will have. The pilot acts as the first push for electronic user services in vehicle transport in Finland. The goal of the market demonstration is to pilot the model in the con-sumer market.

• Common platform for commercial and public mobile services

Private and public sector services will be provided within the same service package. This requires specification of interfaces, procedures and technological requirements.

• Enhancing the know-how of public offices During the trial the public authority will develop a capa-

bility to procure, use and produce information over ” the ecosystem services model” (Designated project of the authority)

NOTE1 Forrester research 29.02.2014

“Cars are evolving into an important media consumption channel and becoming a new part of our everyday connected devices”

Figure 1. Common platform for commercial and public mobile services



• Support the market through innovative procurement

Participation is limited to companies or company groups that: 1. Are able to produce road pricing data to public authorities 2. Enable traffic apps 3. Commit to the operating model and preconditions

Preconditions may include for example vehicle classes and types, price level of data, privacy protection, technical capa-bility (SLA), etc. Conditions do not include specific tech-nologies, company size or scope of operations, etc. The authorities are open for any technological approaches from the industry.

ROLE OF AUTHORITIES AND EXAMPLE SERVICES FROM THE MARKETThe authorities are at the same time performing the roles of a customer and a provider. This means that on one hand authorities are buying information from the companies who gather this from their fleets and on the other hand they are also providers as they give their own data for companies to use. Companies gather their data from their fleets that are fitted with data collecting devices. The customers who allow this device to be installed to their cars receive compensa-tion from the authorities and can immediately access the new services. In accordance with the Finnish government decision in spring 2013, the project will also test technology solutions, readiness and applications of transport pricing systems. No actual taxation or obligatory information dis-closure from private people to the authorities is related to the project at this stage

Examples of novel products born in the pilot include remote maintenance and repair services, an automatic driv-ing diary, which automatically produces report for the tax

authorities if needed, different kinds of fleet management programs, parking slot booking services and many more.

HOW TO GET ABOARD?Traffic lab is open to all kinds of companies and consorti-ums who wish to take part in developing new kind of traffic services. Businesses can test and develop their own services and applications in a real market ecosystem. The state has the role of a customer and a provider of opportunities and the businesses themselves will invest in the development of their operations. The estimated budget for the entire project is €5–8m. The market demonstration was launched in spring 2014 and it will last until the end of 2015. At the end of the project its effectiveness and user experiences will be exam-ined. The project will be presented at the ITS Europe 2014 Congress in Helsinki in June. After the test period, the mar-ket is supposed to continue on its own without government intervention. Government or municipalities may still want to buy services or traffic data from the companies involved after the test period.

A pilot of commercial actors and the authorities is divided into two projects that will be carried out at different stages: • A service pilot project that creates rules and necessary def-

initions for the provision of both public and private sector services on the same service platform. The authorities will develop their activities so that they can buy both real-time and distance-based information on charge criteria, and businesses will develop their ability to provide services on a so-called multiservice platform.

• A market demonstration project, under which compa-nies sell their services that have been provided under the multiservice principle to end users and other busi-nesses. The services in the project are market-based and the authority creates opportunities for new markets by buying information and services from commercial

“Businesses can test and develop their own services and applications in a real market ecosystem”

Figure 2. Enhancing the know-how of public offices Figure 3. Support the market through innovative procurement


Traffic lab

actors. In order to participate in the market demonstra-tion project, the actor/consortium must be able to deliver information or service that the authority needs in accord-ance with the requirement level and service and pricing levels following the multi service principle. The aim at the market demonstration stage is to create a service ecosys-tem that enhances the chances of small and medium-sized service providers to offer their services.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Eemil Rauma is an analyst with EERA

Elias Pöyry is coordinator of the Traffic Lab initiative and executive director of Electric Traffic

[email protected]@eera.fi

www.eera.fi

FLIR ITS ads Trafibot HD 190x117.indd 1 17/04/14 14:54

Figure 4. Pilot for services and Applications in Road Traffic – milestones



Vehicular networking and road weather services are advancing traffic safety in Finland, say Timo Sukuvaara, Pertti Nurmi, Evgeny Atlaskin, Kari Mäenpää and Riika Ylitalo

Driving back the elements

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and between vehicles and roadside infrastructure (V2I) has been widely studied as an enabler of enhance-

ments in traffic safety and efficiency. In recent studies the role of road weather information and vehicle-oriented observations have been recognized as key elements in the safety enhancements. These elements form the major objec-tives in the European Eureka/Celtic Plus project CoMoSeF (Co-operative Mobility Services of the Future), creating co-operative mobility solutions (including devices and applica-tions) feasible for large-scale deployment.

In practice this means communication systems between vehicles as well as between vehicles and infrastructure employing interactive testing of safety and weather infor-mation exchange services. FMI (Finnish Meteorological Institute) has an essential role in the project as a profes-sional weather service provider. FMI is especially focused on approaches to employ CoMoSef vehicular networking entities to provide route weather information for vehicles bypassing a combined Road Weather Station (RWS)/Road Side Unit (RSU). Route weather is a special type of weather

service tailored for dedicated road stretches and is based on a road weather model and data collected from local RWS and from vehicles themselves.

CoMoSeF creates a co-operative communication system between vehicles and vehicles and infrastructure. The aim is not only to service vehicles, but also to exploit vehicle-origi-nated data. Similarly, road-side units are not just serving the vehicles as connectivity points, but they also host RWS capa-bilities to provide additional data for the services. In some cases it may even be more important to have RWS capabilities while compromising the wireless vehicular communications.

Intelligent wireless traffic service platforms with new types of vehicular services for improved traffic safety have been widely studied, among them in the WiSafeCar project that preceded CoMoSeF. CoMoSeF itself brings existing and emerging sensors, services and communication solutions closer to market and creates the business models needed. One issue is vehicle-bus (eg CAN) as a data source. Back-end applications, road side units and road sensors are employed to support drivers’ decisions. An RWS stores and maintains information collected from the near environment of ITS


CoMoSeF

“The CoMoSef project development focuses on nomadic devices with cost-effective services, which are easy to implement and deploy in all vehicles”

Station in its vicinity, based on geo-casting delivery software and a Local Dynamic Map database.

The CoMoSef project development focuses on nomadic devices with cost-effective services, which are easy to imple-ment and deploy in all vehicles. The main envisioned services are the aforementioned weather-related services, warning of poor sections, speeding warnings, safety margin warnings, friction monitoring and forecasting, fog vision detection driver visibility improvement and driver behavior detection, respectively. For the demonstration purposes the idea is to develop and deploy “Road Weather Testbeds” to test wire-less networks and communications in public with advanced communication applications. In the demonstrations con-ducted and yet to come, our goal is to use the local RWS data to generate road weather services and build simple commu-nication procedures around the RWS location to deliver the data to the vehicles.

STATION TO STATIONIn order to fulfill these tasks, FMI has constructed a special RWS nearby to its facilities in Sodankylä in northern Finland. The station is equipped with up-to-date road weather meas-urement instrumentation, compatible (but not limited to) with the equipment expected to also be available in the

Vehicle user interface (UI) for RWS data

Combined Road Weather Station (RWS)/Road Side Unit (RSU)



demonstration site’s own, permanent and locally owned RWS. The procedure is to design, develop and test both the local road weather service generation and the service data delivery between RWS and vehicles.

The CoMoSef project will use the IEEE 802.11p stand-ard as the primary communication entity, with supporting LTE, Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11g/n) and cellular networking (3G) as the alternative communication methods if IEEE 802.11p based system or equipment is not available. In the Sodankylä RWS there is the IEEE 802.11p primary com-munication system, supplemented with parallel Wi-Fi communication and alternative 3G com-munication, respectively. In the Sodankylä com-bined RWS/RSU scenario the focus is on V2I communication.

The vehicle bypassing the combined Road Weather Station and Road Side Unit (RWS/RSU) is supplemented wirelessly and automatically with up-to-date road weather data and services, and also potentially available vehicle-oriented measurement data are delivered upwards. The local server in RWS/RSU hosts the station opera-tions. It is linked with a NEC Linkbird-MX modem for IEEE 802.11p communications but has also an internal Wi-Fi modem. Both of these communication channels are actively seeking the bypassing vehicle communication systems. The local server is also gathering measurement data from two different meas-urement entities, Vaisala Rosa road weather measurement system and FMI weather station measurements, respectively. The data from these sources, together with possible vehicle-oriented data are sorted and further delivered to FMI local facilities through a 3G communication link. The advanced services are developed in FMI facilities and delivered back to the RWS/RSU to be further delivered to vehicles. The same software entity maintains the data delivery between RWS and vehicles and RWS and FMI site, while gathering and updating the local weather data from the RWS/RSU.

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMEDThe main advantage of RWS/RSU is the exploitation of local RWS and vehicle data for up-to-date weather services. Adverse road weather conditions like icy roads, fog, heavy precipitation and strong winds can cause accidents, traffic congestions and delays. Forecasting and weather informa-tion systems and applications have been actively developed by FMI, since the Finnish wintertime weather conditions can be extremely demanding. A state-of-the-art operational real-time road weather forecast system covering the whole of Finland is being run operationally by FMI to serve traffic safety needs.

FMI will implement and further develop road weather systems for the test sites. The basis for road weather analysis

and forecasting is a 3-dimensional atmospheric Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model which is based on physical-mathematical equations describing the state of the atmos-phere. Such models simulate the major physical processes behind different weather phenomena and produce explicit forecasts of various meteorological quantities. The models can also produce ”post-processed” output variables defin-ing different road conditions like dry, wet, frosty, snowy, or icy conditions. The forecast domain of the model covers the whole of Europe and the idea is to “downscale” it to test sites. To produce road weather forecasts along individual road stretches we need to tackle higher spatial and time resolu-tions than presently available. To accomplish this we employ a method of dividing road stretches into a number of seg-ments and performing model simulations for each segment.

Depending on available computer resources, the scale of a road segment can vary from a few kilometers down to meter-scale. Local road weather observations are useful to initial-ize the road weather model, thus resulting in more accurate forecasts. The number of deployed road weather stations (at the test sites) is, however, limited hindering a detailed anal-ysis of the meteorological conditions along the roads. The analysis of the meteorological conditions will be performed either by a data assimilation system incorporated into the NWP model, or through a high spatial and time resolution

RWS data application in the Internet and in the Android tablet

37Europe/Rest of the World Vol 9 No 2

CoMoSeF

local analysis scheme that is presently under operational exploitation at FMI.

The state of the road surface depends on traffic intensity and volume. At near-surface temperatures slightly below 0ºC the tyre friction and the heat flux emanating from the vehicle can cause surface ice to melt and thus change the slipperi-ness conditions of the road surface. Therefore, taking into account the traffic intensity and volume is very important in the computations of the road surface temperature and water phase changes. Traffic will be taken into account by the model in places where such information is available.

Road maintenance actions, such as spreading of reagents and snow ploughing can substantially alter the state of the road surface. It would, therefore, be very important to take into account the road maintenance scheduling and the resulting actions in order to be able to initialize the model with proper input data and to produce forecasts with higher accuracy. Unfortunately, the information on road mainte-nance actions is typically not available to weather services. Being available such information could be included in the model initialization.

The main focus of this work is on the architecture for a V2V and V2I access network. The architecture is on the path for demonstration platforms and evaluation. A set of pilot services focusing on accident warnings and road weather data reflect the general type of vehicular networking services employing the platform. The resulting IEEE 802.11p com-munication architecture with 3G and LTE communication and embedded services is the major innovation. Even if the commercial deployment of the architecture remains to be seen, it introduces a considerable outlook of a hybrid com-munication design for the operative vehicular networking environment.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Timo Sukuvaara, Pertti Nurmi, Evgeny Atlaskin, Kari

Mäenpää and Riika Ylitalo all work for the Finnish Meteorological Institute

[email protected]

www.fmi.fivision-traffic.ptvgroup.com

PTV Visum Safety enables transport planners to identify the black spots in the network. Road accident data filtering and visualisation allow them to gain an accurate picture of the current situation on site and take appropriate action. This way, road users are well protected, in particular those who are most vulnerable.

PTV Visum Safety provides you with three strong applications for road safety infrastructure management:

Black Spot Management (BSM), Detailed analysis of historical accident data

Network Safety Management (NSM), Aggregation of safety data

Road Impact Assessment (RIA), Forecast of safety levels

HOW CAN YOU BRING

YOUR VISION ZERO

TO LIFE?Join our freewebinars onroad safety!

Adv_PTV-VISUM-SAFETY_03-2014_90x240_EN.indd 1 28.05.2014 09:54:44

“Analysis... will be performed either by a data assimilation system incorporated into the NWP model, or through a high spatial and time resolution local analysis scheme”



Delivering short-term road weather information to road users in Arctic conditions is no simple task as Heikki Konttaniemi, Timo Sukuvaara, Marjo Hippi, Johan Casselgren and Matti Autioniemi explain

Cold comfort

Typical characteristics of Arctic conditions include very long distances, sparse population and major temperature and precipitation variations. In these

special and often extreme circumstances all the businesses, infrastructure and people still need to function safely and securely.

Currently, the changing climate creates more and more frequent and extreme weather conditions. In spite of these facts, the mobility of people and goods in the North will increase drastically as there is a lot of interest in the Arctic’s natural resources. This is especially true in Northern Finland due to its location in the centre of the Barents region.

In the Arctic Business Forum 2014, the upcoming invest-ments in the Barents are now estimated to be as much as €155 billion. As the density of traffic increases in special cli-matic conditions, it is essential for the people and businesses to have fluent transport and logistics as disruptions mean not only financial losses but also possible injuries or fatalities. As an example, tourism is one major industry that is especially vulnerable to image losses caused by incidents.

CONDITION CRITICALAccording to VTT, in Finland the bad weather conditions are a factor in 20–25 per cent of all road accidents. If the road users had had greater awareness of road conditions, the acci-dent risk would be 10 per cent lower. If that awareness was location-specific, the risk would be decreased as much as by 20 per cent. According to studies done by Tampere Technical University, the risk of accidents will drastically increase when the road is snowy, slushy or icy. The risk is five times bigger when, for example, there is ice and loose snow on the surface when compared to dry road surfaces. The EU has set ambitious goals in halving road fatalities by 2020 and mov-ing towards zero fatalities in the long run. Anticipating and reacting to road weather and slipperiness will therefore defi-nitely have a role to play in the big picture, even at EU level.

Modern sensors and communication technologies can be a hugely effective tool for collecting and transmitting relevant information from the road. Currently the road weather and road surface condition information is acquired through weather forecasts, road weather stations and road weather cameras. The problem is that especially in areas with long distances, there are not enough observations available. However, the latest technological development has enabled

us to gather that information by the use of mobile sensors attached to vehicles. In the future, the vehicles will com-municate road condition information centrally to a cloud or form ad-hoc networks with other vehicles and the infra-structure to exchange data. The vehicles will detect slipperi-ness, among other things, enabling the design of new services based on accurate location-specific data.

Some steps towards this kind of development have been taken in a Finnish-Swedish Intelligent Road project, which is implemented in Northern parts of Finland and Sweden by Lapland University of Applied Sciences, Finnish Meteorological Institute and Luleå Technical University. The project creates a demonstration system for collecting, com-municating, and analyzing and visualizing road weather and road surface condition information.

In the project, there are several frequently travelling heavy trucks as well as passenger vehicles that are continuously gathering data on the condition of the road surface but also on the ambient temperature and humidity. These ‘mobile road weather stations’ have integrated data-acquisition systems designed to collect, process, transmit and receive real-time data from different sensors and data sources. The


Road weather information

“In the future, the vehicles will communicate road condition information centrally to a cloud or form ad-hoc networks with other vehicles and the infrastructure to exchange data”

Experimental road weather station: if awareness of adverse conditions was location-specific, the risk of accidents would be decreased as much as by 20 per cent



contains wireless communication systems for IEEE 802.11g and IEEE 802.11p for communicating with passing vehicles equipped with compatible systems.

WEATHER OR NOT…On top of the measurements on the road, the meteorologi-cal forecasts have an important role when forecasting the road weather. In the future, the observations carried out automatically by vehicles will have an increasingly impor-tant role when modelling the road weather and giving local specific and real-time road weather warnings in the future. The road weather model predicts what happens on the road surface due to different weather phenomena. The FMI road weather model predicts, for example, road surface tempera-ture, road condition and friction. The length of the road

real-time data is GPS-positioned and time-stamped for detection of location-specific road surface condition infor-mation. The in-vehicle systems use optical measurement in detecting the road surface conditions (icy, slushy, wet, snowy, dry), friction estimations, and road surface temperature and water layer thicknesses on the road surface.

As for stationary measurements, there are around 500 road weather stations around the Finnish main road network, mostly located in the southern part of Finland. However, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) has built a special experimental road weather station for Sodankylä in Finnish Lapland in order to create new kind of road weather services. The idea is to combine data from the station, aerial meteoro-logical measurements and large- scale meteorological serv-ices for delivering advanced road user services. The station

Above: Snapshot from public Intelligent Road web interface

Left: Snapshot from the app in development that will also be able to give-real-time information of the sensors installed on the vehicle

Intelligent Road factsAcronym: IR Aim: To demonstrate applications of road weather technologies in a system level Duration: 2012–2014 Partners: 3 main research partners, 6 private financers and 4 national public co-financers Lead Partner: Lapland University of Applied Sciences

The Intelligent Road project is financed partly by EU through the Interreg IV A Nord programme that supports interregional cooperation between Northern regions of Norway, Finland and Sweden.


Road weather information

weather forecasts are typically from ‘nowcasting’ (typically 2 to 6 hours) up to several days. The road weather model uses meteorological observations, road weather station informa-tion as well as numerical weather prediction as input data.

HOW TO USE THE DATA FOR SERVICES Both the mobile and stationary measurements, as well as meteorological data, form a set of data that in the future will enable the service providers to tailor new services for various segments of road users.

The role of the Intelligent Road project is to demonstrate services which are exploiting this data. The public Intelligent Road web interface features types of data available and places it on Google Maps layer. FMI has a public web access to the measurements carried out in their experimental station in Sodankylä. The web application is accessible through http://sodrws.fmi.fi. A vehicle passing by the station will receive the services from the station via in-vehicle computer or a mobile device.

One way to deliver the information is through navi-gation apps that warn the driver of slippery conditions ahead or on the spot. Currently, the Lapland University of Applied Sciences is developing an app that is not only able to

communicate this information but also gives real-time infor-mation of the sensors installed in the vehicle.

The main target groups for such applications are regu-lar road-users, professional transport and winter road maintenance.

Currently the project consortium is looking to design and test new large-scale services in close collaboration with authorities and end-users while involving SMEs comprehen-sively throughout the value chain.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Heikki Konttaniemi is project manager in Arctic

Power research unit of Lapland University of Applied Sciences. Timo Sukuvaara and Marjo Hippi are from the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Johan Casselgren works at Luleå Technical University and Matti Autioniemi represents the Arctic Power unit of Lapland University of Applied Sciences.

[email protected]

www.arcticpower.fiwww.intelligentroad.eu http://sodrws.fmi.fi



Risto Kulmala on improving the duration and quality of journeys via evaluation and piloting

Efficiency drive

The Finnish Transport Agency’s (FTA) mission is to operate the road, rail and maritime transport net-works of Finland. We aim to carry out the mission

as efficiently as possible. Public sector budgetary restric-tions result in a need for prioritization, seeking an optimum between providing the best possible service to the customers (travelers, companies, authorities, and others) and keeping within the budgets also in the long term.

The approach chosen by the FTA has been to define levels of service levels. These levels have been defined to journeys and transports, as these are the links to our actual customers as transport network operators. The identified key service level factors are:

• Safety• Travel time• Predictability• Controllability• Availability• Comfort• Accessibility

The idea is that policy and decision makers determine the minimum and objective service levels, which the FTA and other involved stakeholders fulfill using their tools and services. FTA maintains a development-oriented approach, for which it has a very good track record. Hence, we are working towards an efficient balance of development-oriented and service level approaches.

For ITS, all this means good oppor-tunities. ITS solutions can remove transport problems efficiently. In addi-tion to providing tools for increasing safety and reducing travel time, they

are especially crucial for some service level factors such as predictability and controllability. To have the potential ITS solutions fully utilized, we need to know the impacts and the benefit/cost of the different ITS solutions under varying conditions.

BRIDGING THE GAPIn 2013, a comprehensive inventory of the impacts and benefit/cost of all ITS solutions in road, rail and maritime transport was carried out. Now we have started to fill in the identified knowledge gaps in the inventory by commission-ing evaluation studies. We have started with the ITS solu-tions that will most likely be deployed in a large scale in the near future.

FTA is also initiating and supporting a number of pilots. In addition to providing useful information on the perform-ance, impacts and socioeconomic feasibility of the ITS solu-tions, pilots are an important link in the innovation cycle,


FTA

“To have the potential solutions fully utilized, we need to know the impacts and the benefit/cost of the different solutions under varying conditions”

where ideas are developed into finished services or products. Some of the ongoing pilots are described below.

E18 Oslo-St Petersburg corridorThe E18 Oslo-St Petersburg corridor runs through southern Finland from Turku to the Russian border. It has acted as a weather-controlled road piloting ground since the 1990s. Fitsrus, which is a pilot project that involves a multitude of Finnish and Russian stakeholders, is studying the use of automated weather services, automated incident detection and alert system, real-time traffic and travel time infor-mation service, public transport information service, and an HTML5-based multi-service platform for travel chain optimization.

Traffic LabTraffic Lab is a pilot that is testing the emergence of a dig-ital transport service market for consumers by testing new cooperation and business models in public-private part-nerships. The aim is to achieve a voluntary instalment of on-board units to facilitate ITS multiservice use in up to 60,000 vehicles. The FTA and other public sector stakehold-ers have agreed to purchase such Traffic Lab information that is required by authority services. For FTA, these serv-ices include for instance safety-related traffic information as specified by the EC Delegated Act for ITS Directive’s priority action c), incident management, and winter maintenance.

Road surface condition floating vehicle dataThe FTA has also initiated the piloting of road surface condition floating vehicle data, where heavy vehicle fleets equipped with plug and play devices assess road surface fric-tion based on vehicle sensor data. Currently two different systems are being tested and piloted in Finland with very promising results.

The content and first results of the pilots will be presented in Helsinki during the ITS Europe Congress in June 2014.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Risto Kulmala is Principal Advisor on ITS at the

Finnish Transport Agency (FTA)

[email protected]

www.liikennevirasto.fi

INTERNATIONAL ROAD DYNAMICS INC.www.irdinc.com | [email protected]

Highway Toll Collection Systems

Service and MaintenanceFleet Telematics

Traffic Data Collection Systems


Highway Toll Collection Traffic Data Collection Systems

Commercial VehicleEnforcement/Operations

Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) Scales & Sensors

Border and Security Systems Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) Scales Border and Security Systems

Commercial VehicleHTMS/Traffic Safety Systems

Rule your traffic kingdom.

With IRD’s ITS Solutions

IRD_Crown_halfvert_ThinkingHighways_1303.indd 1 3/15/2013 5:47:38 PM


NATIONAL ITS PLANS Malta

Malta’s National ITS Coordinator Peter Paul Barbara offers a compelling inside view of his country’s impressively far-reaching plans to Kevin Borras

Island of possibilities

“Our main task, besides giving advice to Central Government on forthcoming EU legislative proposals relating to transport

policy, is to come up with project proposals that will com-pete for EU funds through the various EU funding pro-grammes and seek to include Transport Malta as a project partner in as many projects as possible that fall within the general transport policy and objectives of Transport Malta. We believe that participation in such projects expose Malta to the latest technologies on the market as well as innovation.

“We are of the opinion that this is a way to move for-ward concurrently with other European States to continue modernising the transport sector in Malta.”

That, in a very convincing nutshell, is Peter Barbara’s raison d’être writ large – we may be small, but we have big

ideas, so don’t ignore us.Malta is not the first country that comes to mind

when you think of Europe’s most innovative ITS nations, but the publication of its comprehensive National ITS Implementation Plan together with a National Electromobility Action Plan earlier this year caused something of a stir at Thinking Highways HQ. When we decided to print them out (we are still quite old-school at times), we half-expected a couple of small pamphlets, somewhat commensurate with the size of the country itself, but one editorial colleague remarked that “This is more of a book than a brochure” when our printer ran out of paper for the second time. Barbara and his team can certainly be congratulated for the length and breadth of their work but no, environmentalists, we... did not have to print that email…


Malta

“The Maltese Government’s policy on ITS and Electromobility has to be taken in the context of Malta’s unique geographical specificities coupled with its national and EU environmental targets”

So what was the main goal that drove Malta, and the con-tagiously enthusiastic Barbara in particular, to compile such a far-reaching ITS plan?

“The Maltese Government’s policy on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and Electromobility has to be taken in the context of Malta’s unique geographical specificities coupled with its national and EU environmental targets.

Malta is the smallest EU member state with 416,055 inhabitants and a geographical area of just 316 square kilo-metres. The population density is extremely high with more than 1,320 inhabitants per km2 that is over 10 times the EU country average. In terms of urban development and infra-structure, Malta is often referred to as a “city state” insofar as nearly 50 per cent of the population lives in the north and south harbour areas in the conurbation of Valletta. A National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) conducted back in 2010 had concluded that 74 per cent of all trips by

members of a household were being undertaken using pri-vate passenger cars, either as a driver or passenger. This rep-resents a modal share increase of private cars of more than 5 per cent when compared with the findings of 1998 NHTS survey. This change in modal share was mainly due to a modal transfer of trips from public transport and walking.”

With approximately 322,960 licensed motor vehicles on Maltese Roads (as at December 2013) and with numbers still increasing, Malta’s per capita car ownership is one of the larg-est in the European Union as far as national vehicle fleets are concerned. Such car concentrations put additional pressures and challenges on Maltese policy makers to manage such a fleet on such a small road network. This annual increase in motor vehicles particularly in recent years has in turn, been exerting great pressure on Malta’s national transport infra-structure both in terms of the high demand for parking space and motorist demand for increased road capacity.

Top: Charging point; Left: Renault Twizy on the road; Above: Malta’s PORT-PVEV Twizy fleet



“Capacity problems and bottlenecks now exist at a number of critical locations on the 2,350 km of road network, par-ticularly at major traffic intersections located on the 260 km main strategic road network,” says Barbara. “During the last few years, traffic bottlenecks spread from the traditional peak hours normally associated with morning and evening com-muting into other hours of the day and night. While many of the bottlenecks have been alleviated through recent invest-ment in the upgrade of parts of the strategic road network, the high level of urbanisation and environmental constraints at certain critical sections prove to be an insurmountable barrier to the provision of new road links or widening of existing infrastructure.”

A CLIMATE FOR CHANGEInevitably this situation is negatively affecting the state of Malta’s Air Quality levels, where transportation is the main source and contributor to the rise in PM10 and NO2 levels.

“In addition to that,” Barbara explains, “the rise in the number of ICE vehicles is also negatively contributing to Malta’s Greenhouse Gas Emission 2020 targets mandated to Malta under the European Union Climate Change and Energy Package, through the burning of more carbon based fuels. The pressure on the Maltese Authorities is set to increase as both the Air Quality Framework Directive and both the Climate Change and Energy targets are to become more stringent in the long term.”

In a country where the car-culture is spread across the pop-ulation, addressing these problems is something of a mam-moth task. Since 2011, the Government had been addressing the public transport sector by overhauling the public trans-port system leading to a new bus transport system, a new public transport operator and a new bus fleet made up of cleaner and fully accessible EURO V buses to entice private car users to switch the public transport.

This, however, didn’t entirely alleviate the problem. “Although public transport patronage increased considerably since the start of the new revamped public transport opera-tions started, the problem with traffic congestion continued to increase, a fact attributed to the fact the Maltese economy was growing and that people needed to travel more.

“In this respect the Maltese Government through the Ministry for Transport and Infrastructure and Transport Malta which is the National Transport Authority and transport Regulator, the public transport system is being continually improved, with an enlarged bus fleet and the introduction of additional bus routes to increase accessibility and address the demand from the public. To alleviate road traffic congestion, over the coming few years, the Government will increase its support for maritime inter-harbour ferry services to enhance a modal split between the different mode of transport.”

In addition to these measures the Maltese Government is currently looking at other innovative services and solutions

Malta’s per capita car ownership is one of the largest in the EU which puts additional pressures and challenges on policy makers to manage such a fleet on such a small road network


Malta

that could be implemented to make public transport more sustainable and environmentally friendly. The Government has also recently embarked on additional robust and chal-lenging actions specifically relating to the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems and Electromobility, which is the subject of a separate article in Issue 2 of Thinking Cities magazine. Two National Action Plans have so far been pub-lished, each containing specific projects and measures against a set time frame during which they will be implemented.

Says Barbara: “The ITS Action Plan also follows the Intelligent Transport Systems European Framework Directive, so answering your question, the reason for the drive to go down this route was two-fold, the urgent need to address traffic congestion and secondly to follow the other EU Member States with respect to interoperable ITS deploy-ment. On the other hand, the formulation and publishing of the Malta National Electromobility Action Plan was mostly driven by various factors, notably to address the need to improve national air quality levels and to address Malta’s national Climate Change and Energy 2020 targets.”

START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ONAs a relative newcomer to the world of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), the next two years will see Malta rolling out ITS at a national level. For a small island state the planned deployment of ITS is going to be substantial, both in terms

of the impact on the transport system and in terms of invest-ment that has been earmarked for urban traffic management and control. With all this new technology making its way onto Malta’s roads and into the consciousness of its populace, it seemed like a good time to ask how much of it is homeg-rown and how much is imported? With all respect to Maltese companies have been seldom present in the exhibition halls of the ITS Europe and ITS World Congresses.

Barbara, fortunately, takes my question in the manner in which it was meant. “Much of the ITS technologies being currently deployed is imported from abroad or through local agents. Purchasing of such equipment and related solutions are procured through the respective procurement rules of the Government. I would say that at the moment there are a number of companies employed in ITS-related products and solutions. I do not think it is prudent to single out spe-cific companies, but what I can say is that there is scope for a niche market here. I am pleased that local companies are making themselves felt in the international market,” he con-tinues. “We hope that there will be more companies investing both in ITS as well as in the electromobility sectors. If there is increased interest from the private sector, Government may consider in the future the setting up of an electromobil-ity and ITS innovation hub, where companies can carry out R&D activities in Malta and use it as a test-bed for future innovative solutions.”

“The formulation and publishing of the Malta National Electromobility Action Plan was mostly driven by various factors, notably to address the need to improve national air quality levels and to address Malta’s national Climate Change and Energy 2020 targets”

Malta’s National ITS Coordinator Peter Paul Barbara

Malta’s population density is extremely high and there is an urgent need to address traffic congestion



A UNIQUE EQUATIONSometimes, as a journalist, you find yourself asking a ques-tion that you had told yourself not to ask but somehow you asked it anyway. The interview is going well, you and the interviewee are getting on fine so you relax a bit and your guard slips. The next inquiry I put to Peter Paul Barbara was just that question. I knew the answer already but heard myself say it. So, do you look to other countries of a similar size for inspiration, in terms of technology and implementation?

“No not really. As I said earlier, Malta has unique geo-graphic specificities. When I say geographic I mean both in terms of physical topographic characteristics, weather con-ditions, urban and spatial characteristics, land restriction as well as how people live their life in general. All has to be taken in the same context and one cannot leave anything out of the equation.

“I say it is a unique ecosystem. I don’t think that there is another European country of the same size with same kind of population. Luxembourg for example has a very small population comparable to Malta but then its land mass is huge compared to ours. You live in London – your city is approximately 1,572 km2 in area. Malta’s is 316 km2 .We can-not apply to Malta what other countries do. Even as far as governance and the administration of the country are carried out. For example, local governments in Malta operate very differently from other European countries, where each city has its own transport policy specifically for that city. In Malta this approach doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense that each local government would have their own local transport policy. All policy issues concerning all of the economic sec-tors and respective activities are conducted in top-to-bottom approach. However, that said we do take note of the tech-nologies that are available on the market and we adapt these to suit our needs and specific circumstances.”

POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH“The fact that we do not have as yet a fully fledged Intelligent Traffic Management and Traffic Monitoring System, gives us the opportunity to build everything new from the ground up without the need to upgrade existing or ageing equipment,” explains the ebullient Barbara. “Hence the current and future investments that are earmarked for ITS deployment, is intended to put in place the foundations for Malta’s future National ITS network.

“We are doing this in accordance with the latest indus-try standards as well as in line with the EU-ITS Framework Directive as well as the EASYWAY Guidelines. At this stage we are at a point where the projects offered are being evalu-ated and it is expected that installation works will start over the coming few months.”

Barbara maintains that traffic management, especially the management of congestion, is a challenge everywhere, regardless of whether it is a city or an island, but I was still

keen to know what measures are taken to overcome the geo-graphical and spatial limitations that must surely compound the problems.

“In the case of the Maltese islands, that’s Malta and Gozo, urbanisation is rapidly eating away from the geographical boundaries that in the past separated a town from a village or a village from another village. In my opinion, Malta is taking the shape of a one large cosmopolitan city. The differ-ence lies in the respective topography of Malta when com-pared to that of a planned city. At this point in time, Malta is made up of a number of conurbations that by time will continue to expand and merge together into one continuous urban area. Even as a capital city Valletta is not really com-parable to any other major cities like Paris, London, Rome or Tokyo that are regarded as financial centres in their own right. These cities, all have their own specific “Historical City Centre” from where the city grew outwards into one large urban agglomeration. In the distant future, Valletta may also end up as the “Old Historical City Centre” within a large urban agglomeration – Malta.”

On several occasions, transport consultants contracted by the Maltese authorities have offered traffic related solutions that are already in place in a number of major European Cities but which were entirely unsuitable for Malta. Such solutions do not really work as every geographical area has its own particularities and specificities, and hence generic

Mitsubishi i-MIEVE: compact, electric vehicles are ideal for these narrow roads and out-of-town driving alike


Malta

“The first phase started in 2013 and will continue through 2017 while the second phase will be carried out from 2018 to 2020”

solutions do not really make any sense in a country the size and shape of Malta.

“It is for the same reason we do not have a bicycle cul-ture as in, for example, the Netherlands. This is because the Maltese hilly topography and extreme climate conditions across the different seasons make it almost impossible to adopt the same culture. Anyone who has visited Malta will know the reasons for this! The main challenges arise because space is limited. We can’t do anything about that but what we can do is introduce technologies to try and make our trans-port system more efficient, and that is how we intend to face those challenges.”

NO LET UPBarbara was kind enough to give me a few hours of his time but I was conscious of taking up too much of it as his diary was already overflowing with appointments. He certainly isn’t short of things to do.

“No, far from it! Right now I am fully immersed in pipeline project preparations. My overall responsibility is to implement the Malta National Electromobility Action Plan. This is a major challenge for us. We have planned deployment year by year and we cannot afford to miss these self-imposed deadlines. Another important project we will be working on in the future is the planning of the second phase of ITS Deployment that will be done in conjunction with the Directorate responsible

for traffic management set up recently within Transport Malta. The National Intelligent Transport System (ITS) Action Plan is a synthesis of how Transport Malta intends to roll out Malta’s first major ITS deployment which is split in two phases and spanning an eight-year timeframe. The first phase has already started in 2013 and will continue through 2017 while the sec-ond phase will be carried out in the following three years, from 2018 to 2020.”

Malta’s ITS Action Plan has been developed within the framework of the six main priority areas split into a number of actions contained in Directive 2010/40/EU that will be carried out over a seven-year timeframe.

“Through this deployment and because of the small and manageable size of the transport network, Malta will be one of the first European countries to have all of its main road network, transport hubs and termini seamlessly connected in real-time at a national level,” says Barbara proudly. “The roll-out of ITS at the national level in the first phase will gen-erate vast quantities of raw travel and traffic data that can be filtered and structured to provide a vital monitoring and assessment tool for transport planners and operators, emer-gency services, policy makers and control bodies.”

Initial preparations are already underway for the second phase of the ITS Action Plan that envisages further enhance-ments and additions to Phase 1 as well as its extension to Malta’s urban core areas.

“The main aims of Phase 2 will be to further improve pub-lic transport efficiency, road safety and air quality. Transport Malta shall carry out a mid-term review of this Action Plan towards the last quarter of 2015 to assess the results achieved during Phase 1 of deployment,” concludes Barbara before thanking Thinking Highways for our interest and hurrying off to his next appointment.

The sheer scale of both the National Electromobility Action Plan and the National ITS Implementation Plan is quite clearly not just a marketing tool. Small island, big ideas indeed

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Peter Paul Barbara is National Coordinator of the

Malta National Electromobility Platform and Intelligent Transport Systems

[email protected]

http://www.transport.gov.mt/

Part of the PORT PVEV Project: new BMWi3 at Muscat’s showroom


TELEMATICS Asset tracking

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have become used to widespread reports of highway robberies, vehicle and cargo theft, but is it really that bad? Not any more, says Semyon Fokin, General Manager of Cesar Satellite’s Automotive Division, but there is still a lot of work to do, as he told Julia Nelepa

An inherent deterrent

It’s fair to say that Russia has featured rather prominently in the news of late, but one thing that has not changed is its emerging status as an economic and political power-

house. Russia is huge and the state of its road infrastructure, although improved in recent years, still lags behind most of Europe. Highways are long, narrow and, for the most part, poorly repaired. Services and police outposts outside of major cities are scarce. [but technology is helping in the fight against crime on Russia’s highways????]

Russia has become a high-volume destination for imported goods, much of which comes in by road from Western Europe. Yet, fears are that crime is rampant and police is inefficient. How bad is it in reality?As you know, Russia is a country with a European outlook, but an Asian mentality. There are, obviously, some unique factors: huge distances between cities, rather low density of population, fast market growth and, at the same time, rela-tively high volatility. There is a significant income inequal-ity, as well, and living standards differ a lot from region to region. Overall, this unstable economic and social environ-ment, unfortunately, provokes crime. Meanwhile, emergency response outside of major cities can be quite problematic – the structure of the police forces is rather complex and decentralized, and its efficiency and resources vary greatly from region to region. Interaction between different regional police forces is sometimes quite complicated. For a driver in distress, it is often very difficult to determine which number to call for help, and how to reach the nearest police station using their mobile phone. As a result of all this, it is, unfortu-nately, quite easy to commit a crime on the road somewhere, and no one will be able to come to the victim’s rescue in time. Therefore, the issue of cargo theft is a huge topic in Russia.

Vehicles from Cesar Satellite’s own security agency patrol the streets of Moscow, St Petersburg and along the major transport routes in Russia

Is it primarily theft or are we talking about violent road crime that has been widely reported in the global press t since the early post-Soviet years in Russia?It is much more often theft, than robbery or any type of violent crime. Contrary to perception, violent crime on the roads in Russia is very rare – which, I think, has a lot to do with our laws. Penalties for any crime involving vio-lence, such as robbery or hijacking, are much higher than for pure property crime. Theft, at the same time, is quite easy to commit and get away with. Cargo theft, specifically, is a low priority for law enforcement. It is not a politically viable


Asset tracking

issue that concerns the public too much, and it tends to affect mostly medium-sized and large businesses, which aren’t par-ticularly in favour in Russia nowadays.

So, what are the major weak points for cargo theft? Breakdowns, rest stops? Lunch breaks and overnight stops, for sure – the cargo could be offloaded, or the entire vehicle can be stolen while the driver is away. Surprisingly though, this isn’t all – theft from a moving vehicle is quite widespread as well. There was even a movie about this recently on the Russian TV: a car attaches itself to a moving truck, at the same time as another over-takes it, distracting the driver. The doors are opened, and several packages of goods are offloaded into the car through a windshield that is dismantled. It then detaches and leaves, and the driver often does not realize what has happened, until he arrives at destination. This often happens with ciga-rette shipments for example and in fact cigarettes are most often stolen this way – and direct loss from a single incident may be up to €100,000. There is also a compound indirect loss that is a result of stolen cigarettes of certain brand flood-ing some regional markets at highly discounted prices. Local consumers are subsequently less willing to pay the full price for legally imported and taxed cigarettes of the same brand. Competition from trade in stolen tobacco drives overall prices, and profits, down.

In a scenario like this, as you say, the driver doesn’t even notice that anything is happening, so a panic button, which is a standard feature in fleet management systems, will not be of any use. How can we address this?Currently, there are several theft prevention methods avail-able on the market and we are providing all of them. First, and the most expensive one, is a security escort. It’s very sim-ple – you hire a vehicle with armed guards, who are escort-ing your truck, or a convoy of several trucks. It is then very unlikely that something would happen, and is also effective against any hypothetical fraud scenario involving the driver. Second and a bit less expensive is to hire an armed guard who will travel in-cabin with the driver – this can be a private guard or an agent from local police security force. It is also quite efficient but may not, for instance, help against theft from a moving vehicle as described earlier – the guard’s view will be just as obstructed as the driver’s. Additionally, there is

a potential for human error – for instance, the driver and the guard going to lunch together, leaving the vehicle or cargo open to theft.

The third method is a telematics fleet management system with a panic button. The driver can detect that something is happening with the vehicle and react. The major disad-vantage though, is that basic service offered by almost all fleet management providers does not include guaranteed response time. In most areas of Russia, emergency signals from panic buttons and sensors that are set off on a basic fleet monitoring system, will be referred to local police forces, where timing or efficiency of response varies by region, and depends greatly on the location of the incident. There is a risk that, by the time the help comes, everything could be stolen already.

And to what extent can we rely on the Russian police force? We hear a lot in the news about allegations of corruption, and local forces that are sometimes less equipped than the criminals they are trying to apprehend. Firstly, of course, this situation is changing – and not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also all over Russia. Secondly, we are not talking about very sophisticated types of crime, nor the sort of criminals that ride around in Porsche Cayennes. These are regular criminals in average unremark-able vehicles, committing relatively low-risk, from their per-spective, crimes.

However to guarantee efficient police response you need to have relevant experience and established cooperation with them. We as Cesar Satellite have a very good track record cooperating with police forces all over the country, since we have been doing it for over 15 years in relation to our vehicle theft services. Currently we have more that 150 coop-eration agreements with various police and state emergency response bodies all over Russia. From the police standpoint, working with us is very efficient, because we use our tracking systems to help them catch the thieves. Thanks to us, they can close more cases, improve their crime solving statistics and receive promotions and commendations. So when we call and say that there is an emergency ongoing and we need help, they will send their best people immediately, because they know that in the end, it is likely to be beneficial for

“Emergency response outside of major cities can be quite problematic ... efficiency and resources vary greatly from region to region”

Semyon Fokin, General Manager of Cesar Satellite’s Automotive Division


TELEMATICS Asset tracking

“We use our own crews, as well as our existing partners in the home alarm service that are included in the network. That allows us to provide total coverage for several major routes”

them. And by the way we are not calling them any more – a couple of years ago we have completed M2M integration with the Police and Ambulance vehicle dispatching systems so now we send incident cards to them automatically from our monitoring software.

However, in order to guarantee an efficient and timely response we still need to have a network of our own vehicles and our local partners’ crews, so that when something hap-pens we always have a security crew nearby that will respond to the incident. Therefore we run our own security agency, which currently employs about 200 people in more than 60 response crews, mostly in Moscow, St. Petersburg and along the major transport routs. Also we cooperate with more than 600 security agencies in all regions of Russia that provide their vehicles upon our request.

All methods that you mentioned so far are quite tradi-tional. Are there any new technologies for cargo security? Absolutely. Last year we started rolling out a service that we call a “secure transport corridor”. For this service, we devel-oped an infrastructure of emergency response crews along-side the particular roads, so that we can guarantee response time of no more than 15-20 minutes, no matter whether an emergency happens 50km or 500km from Moscow. This setup provides the same efficiency as security escort but pro-vides significant economy to the truck owner.

But it must surely require a lot of people and resources…Our experience shows that for that you need to have a crew every 30-50km. We use our own crews, as well as our existing partners in the home alarm service that are included in the network. That allows us to provide total coverage for several major routes. The first route where we started offering this service was the road between Moscow and St. Petersburg, and further North to the Finnish border, starting at any of the three major crossings between Russia and Finland. The secure transport corridor is like an improved telematics

service, where there is system installed in the vehicle, but there are also battery-powered trackers than can be embed-ded directly in the goods, to control not only where the vehi-cle is, but where the goods are. That way, even if the vehicle is on track and the driver hasn’t noticed anything, we can see if the goods are getting off course, and this will also trigger the guaranteed emergency response.

This would only make financial sense for you, if there was a certain amount of subscribers, though, wouldn’t it?It’s more a case of a certain amount of deliveries per month actually. Of course, in order to guarantee the advertised response time, we have to maintain all of this integrated structure, including our own crews, our partner crews, coop-eration with police in certain regions and so on. We need to invest in this service on a monthly basis in order to continu-ously maintain it on developed routes.

However, in a major transport corridor such as this, there is a sufficient demand to provide this service, and it turns out very cost effective. Security on a shipment along this secure transport corridor can cost the shipper 30-50 per cent less compared to other methods currently used on high-value shipments, e.g. security convoys and armed guards. We have just rolled out the same service on another major route from Western Europe: from Poland via Belorussia to Moscow.


Asset tracking

But Belarus is a different country with its own specific circumstances.Indeed it is. For instance, operation of private security serv-ices is not allowed in Belarus under local law, so on their ter-ritory, we have to rely on local police forces. It must be noted though, that Belarus today is much more like the old Soviet Union – the police have much better control over their terri-tory. In Belarus, however, the only types of service available for cargo shipments from the local police will be security guards and armed escorts. The other types of service will start at the border with Russia.

You have so far targeted two main corridors into Western Europe, which is understandable – yet, cargo security and emergency response time is surely as big a problem else-where in Russia as well?Most imported goods come into Russia along one of those two routes, and most go directly to Moscow, where the majority of large companies have their main distribution centers. So, at first this service targeted mostly large import-ers, who already used to similar services being offered else-where in Europe. The problem most certainly does not end there, though. The goods are sold to local distributors or

re-distributed for further transportation to smaller carri-ers that take them in all directions and in a variety of ways and vehicles, and they remain just as susceptible to theft. We are developing two other major destinations for the same service, roads from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, and from Moscow to Ekaterinburg.

Finally, a lot of vehicles on which goods come into Russia from Europe will already have some telematics equipment installed so subsequently there may be a lot of people coming in with devices by different manufacturers, is this a problem?We do provide our own equipment as needed, but pre-installed systems are not an issue, either. Our monitoring system can integrate any sort of data exchange protocol, and we can monitor all kinds of pre-installed devices.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Semyon Fokin is General Manager of the Automotive

Division of Cesar Satellite

[email protected]

www.csat.ru

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SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT Gamification

PleaseCycle’s approach to getting more of us traveling sustainably more often, explained by Crispin Moller and Greg Drach

We’re all gamers

Over one hundred years ago, Cracker Jack started to place a toy in every box of their breakfast cereals to reward chil-dren for eating more of their product. Since then, countless businesses have been using games, toys and other kinds of fun as a means of selling and promoting their products.

Moving this notion into the 21st century, gamification has become the use of game elements and game-design tech-niques in non-game contexts.

The term ‘gamification’ went mainstream in 2010 thanks to a now famous talk by game designers Jesse Schell and Jane McGonigal. Since the TED Talk focusing on the use of game mechanics in non-game contexts the “gamification industry” has become significant with a huge number of companies adopting gamification as a means of increasing engagement to suit their varying needs.

Sustainable travel is something that is on the rise. Transport for London reported an 8 per cent growth in cycling during 2010 which is the equivalent of an

additional 45,000 journeys on top of the half million plus journeys being made by bike each day.

With the percentage of people in the UK also reporting to walk for at least 10 minutes continuously once a week being around 90 per cent of the population, why is it proving so hard to get people out of their cars? With 24m journeys being made in London, not to mention similar cities around the world each day, how can we get more people to think more about their travel methods?

Step up PleaseCycle. Simply put PleaseCycle help get more people running, walking and cycling more often.

PleaseCycle help organizations and local authorities engage with their audiences by targeting a number of key areas in behavioral change, a key factor in encouraging more people to make the switch to more sustainable travel methods.

Providing branded online and mobile portals allowing users to track their journeys, see what CO2 their sustainable journeys have saved compared to driving and how much money sustainable travel can save them PleaseCycle aim to help people understand the impact their travel has on the wider environment. In turn this allows organizations and local authorities to specifically report on the reduced impact their employees or residents have on the wider area, provid-ing key corporate and social responsibility statistics.

WHAT IS GAMIFICATION?Providing methods of encouragement and thus getting peo-ple to think about how they travel is the first step on the road to getting them out of their car, but how does that involve gamification and where did it all start? How can we get people to think more about their travel methods?


Gamification

“It is important to remember that real people use these systems. It sounds obvious, but it is easily overlooked and hard to rectify”

WHAT CAN GAMIFICATION BE USED FOR?According to Buck Consultants, over two-thirds of employ-ers consider gamification an effective strategy for encourag-ing their employees to improve their health and more than 30 per cent of employers intend to adopt a minimum of one health-focused gamified strategy in the next year.

According to M2Research, the market for enterprise gami-fication solutions grew in 2012 by 38 per cent and is pro-jected to be worth US$2.8bn in 2016 and US$5.5bn in 2018, compared to US$421m in 2012.

The prominence of this market has seen a huge influx of gamification in a wide variety of companies such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, McDonalds, Microsoft to name a few.

The particular branch of gamification PleaseCycle use is called behaviour-change gamification that seeks to form beneficial new habits among a targeted audience. Behaviour-change gamification can involve anything from encouraging people to make better health choices, such as eating better or working out more often, to building systems that help people save more money for retirement. Generally, these new hab-its produce desirable societal outcomes: less obesity, lower medical expenses, a more effective educational system, and better financial decisions.

PleaseCycle provides a tool targeted to get more people to cycle and increase cycling frequency among casual cyclists.

HOW DO PLEASECYCLE IMPLEMENT GAMIFICATION?The successful implementation of gamification requires a number of key objectives to be outlined in order to target the desired behavioural change.

Step 1: Define main objectives PleaseCycle’s main objective is to get more people cycling more often.

Step 2: Delineate target behaviorsIt is important to focus on the desired behavioral change in order to put in the correct means of measurement in place. Since behaviors and metrics are best considered together, PleaseCycle’s target behaviors are concrete and specific. Some of the examples include:- Sign up for an account on the website- Log cycling trips at least once a week- Create a goal - Take part in a cycling competition- Form or join a team- Share your experiences on Facebook or Twitter

Step 3: Describe the usersIt is important to remember that real people use these sys-tems. It sounds obvious, but it is easily overlooked and some-thing that it is very hard to rectify. It’s important to know who the users are and anticipate and understand what their needs are and will be moving forward. It is important that the information captured is carefully analysed to provide the most relevant experience to users throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Step 4: Devise Activity/Engagement Cycles There are two kinds of ‘activity cycle’ used on the PleaseCycle platform: engagement loops and progression stairs. Engagement loops describe, at micro level, what users do, why they do it, and what the system does in response. Progression stairs give a macro perspective on the ‘player’s’ journey. It’s important to get these cycles right as getting them wrong means you risk undoing any behavioral change already achieved and potentially loosing the interest of the user fulltime.

Activity Cycle:

Progression Stairs:

Motivation

ActionFeedback

Levels


SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT Gamification

Step 5: Don’t forget the funBefore a gamification solution is implemented it is important to take a step back and as a simple question: is it fun? Fun isn’t easy to predict, but the best way to tell if the system is fun is to build it, test it and refine it though a rigorous design systems. PleaseCycle have gone through a number of phases in order to produce products that work for the specific audi-ences they are asked to cater for.

Step 6: Deploy the Appropriate ToolsThe last stage is to pick the appropriate game mechanics, components and elements and deliver them through an effective mechanism. PleaseCycle are very careful about which elements are selected, constantly bearing in mind that the user experience should be fun and motivating to encour-age increased usage. It is as refined balance of various ele-ments that helps create a successful system.

DOES IT REALLY WORK?PleaseCycle have based their latest product variation on a variety of different applied theories, putting them to the test in a couple of notable case studies which we will explore later in the article.

Firstly the science:The Fogg Behaviour Model – developed in 2011 by B.J. Fogg indicates that behaviour change occurs once triggered only when motivation levels are high and/or when users’ ability to complete a task is increased.

Self-Determination Theory – developed by Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and their collaborators suggests that human beings are inherently proactive, with a strong internal desire for growth, but their external environment must support this, otherwise these internal motivators will be thwarted. SDT indicates that these needs fall into three categories: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. - “Competence”, or mastery, means being effective in deal-

ing with the external environment: learning how to cycle, route planning, preparing appropriate clothing.

- “Relatedness” involves social connection and the universal desire to interact with and be involved with family, friends, colleagues and others.

- “Autonomy” is the innate need to feel in command of one’s

life and to be doing what is meaningful (getting healthier, reducing the impact on the environment, saving money).

According to the theory, tasks that implicate one or more of these innate human needs tend to be intrinsically motivated. In other words, people will do them for their own sake. It is our job to boost these motivators and make them easier to feel and achieve.

The Tools- Increase motivation: PleaseCycle have used a number of

gamification tools such as: badges, goal setting, tracking cycling progress, leader boards and friendly competition with colleagues.

- The ability to share achievements: Links with Facebook and Twitter encourage teams through social interaction

- Reward: Discounts in local shops and restaurants based on your BikeMiles are also very powerful extrinsic motivators

- Inform: PleaseCycle provide a lot of information on how to get started and prepare for cycling e.g. what bike and what clothing.

- The ‘Weather Widget’ and ‘Journey Planner’ make route planning easy and fun.

- Triggers: we use a number of triggers such as nudge emails; competitions and challenges to stimulate the desir-able behaviour change.

• Self-Determination Theory – this theory developed by Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and their collaborators sug-gests that human beings are inherently proactive, with a strong internal desire for growth, but that the external

“Gamification has proved hugely influential when it comes to people’s buying habits”


Gamification

go:cycling One Month Case Study

REFERENCESThe authors used the following resources to write this article- Video lectures from Coursera’ massive open

online course (MOOC) “Gamification” - “For the Win” by Kevin Werbach- BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Model: http://

www.behaviormodel.org/- Self-Determination Theory: http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Self-determination_theory - Market statistics:

http://www.buckconsultants.com/http://www.biworldwide.com/http://www.m2research.com/gamification-2012.htm

go:cycling is a local authority initiative based in Leeds for the West Yorkshire area. They have been tasked with getting more people cycling as both a means of being healthier and as a means of travel, relieving congestion within the City are surrounding area.

PleaseCycle carried out a one-month challenge in conjunction with go:cycling as a focal point of action, drawing on Fogg’s behaviour change theory and providing impetus for people to try cycling. They enjoyed a high participation rate during the challenge as well as following it, utilising the self-determination theory and PleaseCycles various intrinsic tools following the challenge. As post challenge survey revealed the following:

o “Relatedness” involves social connection and the uni-versal desire to interact with and be involved with fam-ily, friends, colleagues and others.

o “Autonomy” is the innate need to feel in command of one’s life and to be doing what is meaningful (getting healthier, reducing the impact on the environment, saving money).

According to the theory, tasks that implicate one or more of these innate human needs tend to be intrinsically motivated. In other words, people will do them for their own sake. It is our job to boost these motivators and make them easier to feel and achieve.

CONCLUSIONAt the beginning of this article we posed a question. How can we get more people to think about their means of travel and instigate a behavioural change thus benefiting themselves and others?

Gamification has proved hugely influential when it comes to people’s buying habits. The volume of investment going into the sector is a clear indication that the appetite both in terms of consumers and suppliers/employers/authorities is growing. With people’s travel habits beginning to shift gami-fication shows signs of being a key method of assisting the change and seeing that it is not simply a phase and is a key long term progression.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Greg Drach is business development director and

Crispin Moller is account director at PleaseCycle

[email protected]@pleasecycle.com

www.pleasecycle.com

If you are interested in implementing PleaseCycle in your organisation or municipality, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at: [email protected]

environment must support this, otherwise these inter-nal motivators will be thwarted. STD indicates that these needs fall into three categories: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. o “Competence”, or mastery, means being effective in

dealing with the external environment: learning how to cycle, route planning, preparing appropriate clothing.


ROAD SAFETY Tunnel safety

The social role of roads is undeniable. Roads service citizens by connecting people with hospitals, schools and workplaces. For this very reason, roads must be

not only efficient, but also safe. The IR2B Strategic Research Agenda highlights the impor-

tance of this topic and calls for innovation on road safety solu-tions and advanced road equipment. In particular, priority 47 of the IR2B Agenda proposes undertaking research and inno-vation efforts in the field of “fire-resistant road surfaces for high-risk areas”.

Tunnels represent one of the features of the road network where safety concerns become more important. Road tunnels hold unique characteristics and deserve special attention, even if accidents do not occur more often in tunnels than in other points of the road network. However, any serious incident involving them causes great social alarm, given 1) the actual difficulties posed to rescue or evacuation interventions, 2) the drama caused to drivers due to the closed configuration of a tunnel and 3) the serious disruption which may involve the temporary closure of a road, mainly when there are difficult or non-existent alternatives to detour traffic.

Some recent fires in European tunnels have stressed the need to adopt efficient measures in order to minimize risks for both people and the infrastructure itself, as shown in table 1.

In this context, materials and computer simulation become essential tools to develop innovative safety solutions to improve safety conditions in road tunnels.

PAVEMENT BEHAVIOUR IN CASE OF FIREDue to the high risk of fire, it is mandatory to ensure that all materials used during the construction stage of a tunnel provide the highest safety level. In this sense, the pavement of the carriageway represents an important part of the cross section in a road tunnel. The presence of combustible mate-rials in the pavement can result into significant distress in

case of fire, as they would contribute to increasing the fire load, emitting toxic fumes and destroying the structural properties of the referred element, therefore making evacua-tion operations more difficult.

Nonetheless, the main risk involved in the presence of a combustible material in pavements is the change induced in fire dynamics.

It must be noted that, when a temperature of 485ºC is reached, asphalt burns. Despite the fact that asphalt combus-tion generates a low amount of heat, the truth is that such heat is produced in the lower part of the vehicle, changing fire dynamics and speeding it up. This heat generation in the lower part of the tunnel makes the fire widespread and causes a sud-den and dramatic increase of power – see figure 1. Speeding up the fire brings then a significant increase of smoke, in addition to the fumes generated by the combustion of the pavement. As a result of this, once the pavement starts burning, conditions around the fire will worsen quickly, preventing firemen from working under safety conditions.

In case the power exceeds 50 MW, fire could also spread to other vehicles. This effect may trap firemen between two fires, since intervention teams have to be as close as 20 meters from the original fire, so as to put it out and new fires can be set behind them. Avoiding this sudden increase of power caused by the combustion of asphalt pavements is essential to guaran-tee the safety of fire fighters.

Last but not least, this combustion in the lower part of the

Hard factsCésar Bartolomé discuss the role of the concrete pavement in improving fire safety in road tunnels

Table 1: Summary of recent fires in European road tunnels


Tunnel safety

the 8% of total energy fire and it should not significantly worsen working conditions. However, the fact is that fire dynamics are often changing and emission rates drastically increase after the asphalt starts burning.

Figure 3 shows the difference between both types of com-bustion processes, depending on the type of pavement.

Concrete pavements (non-flammable), thanks to their inert behaviour, have the advantage of acting as heat accumulators, and their stability under high temperatures allow intervention teams to access the tunnel.

CONCLUSIONSThis author believes that the rules regulating in some European countries the use of concrete pavements in tun-nels whose length is over 500m (Austria) or 1000m (Spain) are therefore well-founded. The amount of fumes and heat released by burning asphalt surfaces is comparable to that produced by the combustion of a truck. The heat energy that asphalt surfaces may release, generated in the low part of the tunnel, can change the dynamics of the fire, leading to an increase of its intensity. Consequently, the fire could easily spread to other vehicles through the pavement. Additionally, the increase in firepower could mean that the design load of ventilation systems was exceeded, making the fire harder to fight and resulting in a higher risk for people and for the structure.

This unfortunate effect took place in some fires that occurred inside tunnels at the end of the 1990s in Austria, France and Italy, and they all resulted into tragedies. When fume extractors are insufficient to eliminate fire gases, heat accumulates inside the tunnel causing other vehicles to catch fire and larger asphalt surfaces to burn. The author’s proposal is that any element that contributes to make the situation worse should be eliminated or minimised.

In some extreme cases, the use of concrete pavements may be the key factor that allows keeping the amount of heat and gases below the standard design limits, so that the extraction system keeps working until the situation is under control.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| César Bartolomé is Director for Innovation

at the Spanish Institute for Cement and its Applications, IECA and Chairman of the “Smart & Green Road Construction and Operation” Programme at the International Road Research Board, IR2B

www.ir2b.org

This article is a summary of a wider study, elaborated by Spanish Technical Association of Firemen, which will be presented next September in the forthcoming 12th Symposium on Concrete Roads in Prague (23–26 September 2014)

Figure 1: Sudden increase of power due to a change in the fire dynamics

Figure 2: Fire power in different scenarios

Figure 3: Differences in fire progress

tunnel may cause the explosion of the wheels of heavy vehi-cles, an additional risk to firemen who are next to the fire. Besides, since asphalt is a thermoplastic material whose viscos-ity decreases with temperature, it becomes significantly softer at temperatures ranging between 150ºC and 180ºC, which are reached approximately 5 minutes after the beginning of the fire and at a distance of 45 meters from the origin of the fire. This distance is longer than the working distance of firemen and it makes their mobility inside the tunnel more complicated.

If asphalt contribution to fire were limited to the energy gen-erated by burning pavement, the power increment would be 4 MW, since the burning surface considered is 100 m2 and the unit power emission is 40 kW/m². This power would represent

Vol 9 No 2 Europe/Rest of the Worldthinkinghighways.com60

THE VIEW From Technology Creation to Deployment

Major infrastructure works need more than ITS

André Vits

At the time of writing Europe is preparing itself to elect a new Parliament. All the pros and

cons of the European Union have been described in length in the national newspapers and prominent members of the European Parliament (EP) have tried to convince the electorate to vote for more or less EU. Looking at it from a distance, it looks to me as although we are arguing over issues that are im-portant we have to put into perspective where this adventure started. Having been in the middle of this process for more than 20 years, the revolution that has taken place in Europe is astonishing.

As if the election of the EP was not enough and subsequently a new Commission, I’m living in a country were on the same day we also had to vote for a federal and regional parliament and of course the respective governments. So, three levels with many political parties and programmes – sufficient material for a master degree!

As an engineer with a particular interested in transport I have been reading the many proposals and watching political debates on the matter. The most fascinating has been the discussion at the regional level on the extension of the Antwerp ring road. Being at the crossroads of major flows of freight, both north-south and east-west in the largest city of Belgium (in terms of inhabitants), the ring road is perhaps one of the busiest in western Europe. For almost 20 years, the need for a new crossing of the Scheld to release the congestion has been advocated. Some five years ago, a magnificent plan emerged from the drawing table of the

administration. Poor communication and diplomatic skills of the project team created such a public reaction that the whole concept was questioned and new alternative solutions have been put forward by groups of contesters.

A FAMILIAR TALEDuring this election campaign, another group of contesters came up with the additional demand to cover the ring road over its entire length to reduce the environmental impact and create new areas for entertainment. In the middle of the election campaign this has obliged the party offices to come up with press communications and comments, applauding the proposal but without committing themselves for the future. In any case, the group who brought the idea in public will not stop after the elections when a new government is in place.

This story is somewhat unfortunate for the road users and the city inhabitants as it delays the decision process, demonstrates a number of pitfalls in the planning process:1) As engineers, we tend to focus

on the quality of the design, be it buildings, infrastructure or other grand designs. Still very little attention is given to operational aspects, and this is what the user spots in the first place! The bridge, for example, can be magnificent (and prominent politicians like to link their name to it) but if it is planned at the wrong place or has major impact on existing residential and business areas major reactions can be expected whatever the overall

❝This story is somewhat unfortunatefor the road users and the cityinhabitants as it delays the decisionprocess❞

benefits will be. The example is perhaps trivial, but users generally have good common sense and easily spot the weakness in the overall plan.

2) Before jumping into the technical design of the scheme, the social acceptance process should be carefully planned and executed. This is a long and difficult process that needs more skills than engineering. It should lead to general acceptance of a master plan and land use plans, not only supported by a number of political parties but by the public in general. Long lead times give business and public time to adapt to the land use changes, and if needed financial compensation should be considered.

3) During the whole planning and design process, engineers and project teams should remain open to suggestions and alternatives. Too often during public hearings one can experience the hostility of the project team when asked to reconsider some elements of the project and architects tend to defend their design with irrational arguments. The reasons for this reluctance are obvious for the public: higher cost or smaller margins.

During the whole project cycle, good and correct communication is essential. This is very difficult because even the communicator will form his own opinion about the project and voluntarily or involuntarily will translate this in their messages. Should one act like one prominent financial advisor, who publicly stated in a regional election show that he will adopt a blank voice, arguing that in his job he has to remain neutral, even in the intimacy of the voting box?

André Vits is the former Head of Unit of the European Commission’s DG [email protected]

They could discover when and where journeys were quicker for them and for their friends and competitors. Not only would a player be competing to capture a station, they would also see who was getting to that station fastest. What was emerging was the possibility of crowdsourcing intelligence on routes and times, as part of game play.

The future of gamifying transport is to personalise the experience of any journey to each user. To attach reward to valuable activities for the network, like going to stations less affected by rush hour congestion, easing pressure on key hubs, to be more ecological in their transport modes, and to see the transport network as a living thing comprised of individuals that they can also influence.

The most difficult aspect is incentivisation and the funda-mental thing to keep in mind is that one size does not fit all. Not everyone likes games and even those that do don’t like all games. To incentivise you have to give the right rewards to the people who will respond to that kind of activity. But we believe the more you can give an element of ownership of the experience to the user. The more that they feel that they can customise or share in the development, the more you can get people to come along with the game you want to play with them.

Creating the liveable city

The smart city should

not be only about the technology. The

human being should

be at the centre of it

SMART TRANSPORT FOR CITIES AND REGIONS

Launch issue

Decem

ber 2013

ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH

IN TRANSPORT How Belgium’s Living Street

came to life, p24

● BARCELONA ● CHICAGO ● FRANKFURT ● GHENT ● LONDON

● MILTON KEYNES ● ÖREBRO ● ROTTERDAM ● SÃO PAULO ● TOYOTA CITY ● TURKU

MOBILITY, MULTIMODALITY

& TRAFFIC EFFICIENCY

Why social media is generating a

wealth of usable data, p52

SAFETY & SECURITY IN

TRANSPORT Intelligent technology is making

our cities safer, p78

SOCIAL & ECONOMIC

CHALLENGESUniversal transit systems are

open for business, p66

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Creating the liveable city

Electromobility, open systems and the

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THE VIEW Australasian Perspective

Disruptive innovation in transport – does it lead to doing more with less?

Prof Phil Charles

The biggest issue facing transport professionals today is how to improve productivity – deliver

more in a constrained resource environment. As consumers, we are accustomed to the constant productivity improvements in technology and related services that lead to dramatic price reductions and performance improvements – otherwise known as disruptive innovation. Examples include the car compared to a horse and carriage, email compared to postal mail, or the PC compared to mainframe computers.

Can disruptive innovation be part of the solution to transport budget constraints? The challenge is that transport infrastructure and services are primarily provided and managed by the public sector, where there are few examples of disruptive innovation.

Elected officials and top management are demanding transport professionals to do more for less. Unfortunately budget cuts only encourage doing the same with less, and more than likely results in doing less with less! And relying on an annual budget cycle only results in short-term thinking.

Disruptive innovation means deploying entirely new technologies and services to create value and radically reducing costs while maintaining or improving services.

In the private sector market forces drive innovation, as profit is increased through creating new products and services that outperform current ones. These competitive forces and incentives don’t usually exist in the public sector and innovation is frustrated by politics and red tape.

There are many opportunities to reduce taxpayer funding and deliver improved levels of service. An example of a potentially disruptive innovation is the parking management system being introduced in Washington, DC. Based on a smartphone app replacing parking meters mobile payment systems provide the ability to vary parking prices based on supply and demand and increase revenue, and provide accurate real-time information to customers.

KEYS TO INNOVATIONSo what are the keys to disruptive innovation in transport?1. Results focus: carefully and clearly

articulating the priority transport outcomes, being as specific as possible, and not constrained by what has been done in the past. Define the trade-offs, and consider how they could be reconfigured. For example, the trade-off between fares or prices and quality of service.

2. Pilot program: test new concepts as carefully designed experiments, using professional project management to ensure efficient delivery, and measure and report performance.

3. Separate Unit: to be successful requires a separate, lean autonomous unit with a clear charter, a realistic business plan, limits to political interference, access to minimal resources (capability, systems, funding) and in the short-term, minimum reporting requirements. Provide ‘white space for innovation’ – a buffer from the threats of special interest groups, rules and bureaucracy and provide encouraging top-level support for innovation.

❝The challenge is that transport infrastructure and services are primarily provided and managed by the public sector, where there are few examples of disruptive innovation❞

4. Market focus: choose a specific market segment to start an innovation project. Governments are often a dominant buyer and can shape the markets they operate in. Choose where there is greatest potential for improvement, focus on a key segment that has the potential for the greatest impact. It is important to develop and align appropriate incentives, both for the public and private sectors, to achieve the desired outcome.

5. Align stakeholders: ensure affected stakeholders are aligned with the pilot program. Where an effort has been made to involve stakeholders, the less critical they are likely to be, as they have a better understanding of the processes, issues and what you are trying to achieve.

6. Demonstrate results: the best case for change is one that has been argued using scientific research and valid data.

7. Identify next steps: having run a successful pilot program the critical success factor is speed of implementation. To achieve this requires identifying the lessons from the pilot program then setting out how the program can be scaled to achieve maximum benefits, including opportunities for additional revenue sources, changes needs in regulations and procedures, and change management strategy for public and private sector players.

Disruptive innovation should be part of the solutions to transport budget constraints. As transport professionals it is our responsibility to challenge the status quo and seek out innovative ways of delivering more effective outcomes for reduced taxpayer investment.

Phil Charles is Professor of Transport at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. [email protected]://transport-futures.com

NOTEFurther reading: Sahni, N., Wessel, M. and Christensen, C. 2013. Unleashing Breakthrough Innovation in Government, Stanford Social Innovation Review.


The last decade’s road pricing schemes as “travel demand management policies” are widely

studied within the EU. Rationing policies, including exceptional vehicle usage restrictions, have been already implemented in several regions in efforts to address congestion and other negative transportation externalities. However, one thing is certain – complex issues as a “traffic demand matrix” cannot be answered just by pricing mechanisms. Of course it is clear that road charging (though not easily accepted by policy makers) needs to attract growing socio-economic interest. It is a good sign that in the era of mobility vehicle usage restrictions, as possible policy measures, are more and more forgotten as it is well recognized that such usage restrictions will always cause welfare losses. More briefly, the states and the industry need to co-examine a realistic road management of real heterogenous users on real roads.

The wise gurus say that “diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest…” They support that the best way for a group to be smart is: for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible. Drinking coffee in Place de Luxembourg under the sun, I love these “wise” (but so provocative and challenging) ideas. The weather is surprisingly warm for Brussels and it is perhaps making me feel that I am ready to compromise. Why not? But where is the dangerous “apple of knowledge” hidden?

When societal models change (as they are doomed to be always replaced

term in a sustainable environment. As motorway operators/managers we work hard trying, in close cooperation with the public authorities, to design and build safe and efficient roads getting our drivers satisfied with the well-managed traffic we provide to them as a high quality service.

The transport service we produce and provide is a simple handbook with two chapters. The one chapter describes how we build and finance our good infrastructure while the other one analyzes how we manage this infrastructure using the proper cooperative I2I and I2V instruments, based on interactive “information channels”. Our priority is a simple one: we don’t want to surprise our drivers, neither by a wrong design, or a wrong construction, unforeseen congestion or diverting them to the middle of nowhere without the proper information.

We, “the motorways”, wonder why are more and more people oversharing personal info? Is it because social media and telecoms have made it the norm to ”tell everybody everything” or do we all have all a desperate need for connection? For us sharing specific information is crucial in building trust with our drivers. We know that some proper “guidance” help all to control the modern obsessive sharing disorder. So we hope that our drivers should ask themselves who they are listening to.

Drivers are connected as never before, but in our information network “less is better” and decency, common sense and good management never go out of style. We fully respect the public opinion but in our business we don’t mix the public opinion with the right opinion.

The key is neither chaos not oppression, but a just enforcement.

by the new models) they need always to redefine the basic corner stones and more specifically the new balance between the terms “democracy” and “order”. A phrase I always remember from my wise grandmother is “grandson, don’t forget that in democratic societies we always trade freedom for prosperity.” Now, getting older, I am mature enough to know that this was not a theoretical pseudo-philosophy, but a hard truth.

On our networks, we, the motorways’ managers, use the above phrase as our key motto and we act accordingly. On our networks we manage hard and we trade “unordered heterogeneous chaos” for “monitored order”, providing a service characterized by appropriate speed, comfort, security and – above all – the highest levels of safety on a daily basis. We prove to be less tolerant of non-sense traffic demand and our key is “right enforcement against oppression”.

Are we revolutionary? I don’t think so. Our motorway managers and CEOs are encouraged to act more like owners of the motorways, we feel they are our roads as they are our homes, our entities.

As an active member of the ITS world, I can easily state that priorities in the EU cities, regions and states are not harmonized; ITS technologies are not mature. Time is needed where private and public must come together and talk, to see the deployment side of the political messages and mainly evaluate their cost. There is one word that both, public and private use when talking, but they surely translate it differently. The term is “profit” that must be seen as a well calibrated socio-economic

THE VIEW Tolling the Highways of the Future

Theory versus reality or exploring the universe of the weird

Kallistratos Dionelis

Kallistratos Dionelis is Secretary General of ASECAP. [email protected]

❝The transport service we produceand provide is a simple handbookwith two chapters❞


THE VIEW Thinking the Highway of the Future

Intelligent road mobility: now or never

José F Papí

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have revolutionized the way business and private mobility is understood

in a safer, greener and smarter transport system. Despite the progress made, I am of the opinion that the “actual” deployment of ITS solutions is not yet sufficient: ITS systems must make further progress to achieve full potential and provide true quality and real-time information to road users. After having mapped out more than 500 R&D and innovation projects worldwide, the IR2B’s Strategic Road Research Agenda has identified 32 research priorities to bring the Smart Roads concept to reality by 2025 in the field of intelligent road mobility. Let me briefly review them:• Effective implementation of

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)• Enhanced synergies derived from data

already supplied by ITS equipment installed in road infrastructures

(Priorities 72-75 of the IR2B’s Strategic Road Research Agenda, period 2013-2015)

The time has come to go beyond the elaboration of “new” ITS studies, analysis and strategies. The binomial “enforcement agents – cameras and radars” needs to be overcome, upgrading the value of existing information and data with more advanced ITS systems. Users must obtain more detailed journey times through smarter processing of data already available from a variety of sources (sensors, Bluetooth, ALPR, satellite, etc). I trust only then will ITS become an unsegmented market in which solutions with mass appeal will benefit billions of customers worldwide. • Optimizing the utilization of existing

road infrastructures (Priorities 76-82, period 2013-2015)

Attaining “The Highway of the Future” also demands a greater optimization of existing infrastructure capacity. The traffic management systems of tomorrow should therefore address this challenge and run tools allowing an efficient and dynamic operation of roads, according to the traffic conditions at a given moment.• Provision of quality and real-time

information to users on the travel options available in the road network, both in public transport and in other transport modes(Priorities 83-87, period 2013-2015)

Whether we like or not, we have come to a point in which the transport “mode” approach is becoming old-fashioned: today we must refer to a transport “system” – I would even call it “ecosystem” – ITS systems can and must have a crucial role in this context, by developing technologies that facilitate freight and passenger transfer between the different transport modes, which can be coordinated more efficiently in order to cut travel times and costs.• A more sustainable and

environmentally-friendly road mobility• Definition of mobility models adapted

to a new generation of vehicles (Priorities 88-92, period 2016-2020)

At the IR2B we also believe that infrastructure-based ITS systems must promote more efficient mobility scenarios that benefit from car industry development and respond to the

❝Whether we like or not, we have come to a point in which the transport “mode” approach is becoming old-fashioned ❞

requirements and opportunities brought by electric, hybrid, plug-in, hydrogen-powered vehicles, etc. • Development and deployment of I2V,

V2I, V2V and I2I cooperative systems in urban and interurban areas(Priorities 93-98, period 2016-2020)

Integrating data generated by both vehicles (V) and the infrastructure itself (I) is a prerequisite if ITS systems are to provide high-quality services to road users. Yet these “cooperative systems” must operate within a common framework and an integral architecture, with a clear definition of the roles assigned to the “V” and the “I”…Still much work to do, isn’t there?• eROAD: The electronic road 2.0• Dynamic infrastructure charging systems (Priorities 99-103, period 2021-2025)

In the long run ITS will definitively build the mobility scenarios of tomorrow, paving the way for groundbreaking solutions such as automated mobility, prediction of driver behaviour, dynamic charging of vehicle use through a reliable and precise positioning system, etc. I deem the future “eROAD” will be a collaborative electronic road 2.0, where users will exchange data in order to disseminate information and contribute to a sustainable road operation and maintenance.In short, most of the challenges posed by the intelligent road mobility of the future are still ahead of us and represent a fantastic business opportunity for the traffic management industry. I therefore invite you to review the roadmap proposed by the IR2B to address them (downloadable for free from http://www.ir2b.org/#!publications/cmx9).

What are we waiting for?

José F Papí is Chairman of the International Road Research Board, [email protected]; www.ir2b.org @The_IR2B (LinkedIn) http://goo.gl/zTiMj7


THE VIEW IBEC: ITS and Evaluation

Evaluating incremental and radical innovations

Dr Alan Stevens

Benefit-cost assessment (BCA) methodologies have a long history and despite

many acknowledged flaws and subtle arguments are well embedded in many business processes. In mainstream implementation, the essential process is to monetise and then add all the expected costs and all the expected benefits into the future and then discount back to present day. Such a process works well for projects that involve building a new facility or developing a new service such as Automatic Crash Notification (eCall in Europe). Before the project, the facility or service isn’t there and we envisage the process and the future costs and benefits.

The situation becomes more interesting in the real world where innovation is often incremental and takes place against a backdrop of existing products and processes, some of which are disturbed by the innovation. This seems particularly to be the case in the developing area of cooperative systems (connected vehicles) and the rapid but incremental progress being made towards more automated systems.

Figure 1 illustrates how both the road infrastructure and the vehicles that use the infrastructure are increasingly becoming smarter. Every step brings benefits by building on previous developments. In one view, automated vehicles are a radical innovation but they can also be seen as the result of many incremental developments of the past 20 years.

As noted, innovation whether radical or incremental, can disturb the status

❝In one view, automated vehicles are a radical innovation but they can also be seen as the result of many incremental developments of the past 20 years❞

BCA of the individual steps. Of course, in looking forward it may not be clear where we are going and there is a greater innovation risk the more radical the change. It seems that often we are implicitly prepared to accept lower BCA because of the lower innovation risk.

This argument is not just academic as step-skipping is a particularly relevant issue for emerging economies that can take advantage of the experience from other regions. Even for those economies further along the ITS development path the question of how we value radical and incremental innovations is still very much an open issue.

IBEC is organising a number of sessions and events in association with the ITS World congress in Detroit this year relevant to this topic. These include: IBEC4 “Evaluation of highly automated driving and truck platooning”; IBEC5 “Evaluating benefits and business cases for cooperative ITS (connected vehicles)”; and the IBEC Workshop “Evaluation of connected (vehicle and infrastructure) and autonomous vehicles”.

Alan Stevens is Research Director, Transportation at TRL and IBEC Management Committee Member [email protected]

Figure 1: Progress towards cooperative and automated systems

quo and may marginalise or render redundant previous facilities or services. For example, road loops can be largely replaced by above ground sensors or by connected vehicles communicating with the infrastructure; similarly, the need for Variable Message Signs will likely be reduced (or, at least, the signs simplified) with the advent of in-vehicle messaging via smartphone Apps.

How these effects are taken into account by BCA is an area that probably needs more attention. Previous generations of technology are be treated as a “sunk cost” in BCA and, in a way the risk of redundancy can be included by estimating the number of years that future benefits will be counted. But should this risk be made more explicit?

Another issue is how efficient the incremental progress is in the sense that each step requires investment that will become, at least partially, redundant by the next step which also requires investment. If we had the foresight and it were possible to skip some steps, then the BCA should be improved compared with the actual (delivered)


THE VIEW Automated Vehicles

Not for the first time Google has us all agog

Richard Bishop

Last month, Google once again put the media and pundits into something of a frenzy. Yes,

Google is really building their own cars, and they will drive themselves.

Google, now engaged in a wide variety of projects, actually started with the self-driving car project. From the beginning, they focused on a transformational approach – developing vehicles that can do ALL the driving, with no need for human input other than where to go. Google’s approach is captured by this (paraphrased) quote from Chris Urmson, leader of the self-driving car team: “You can get a lot more fired up in the morning when you’re thinking about changing the world rather than making an incremental improvement on something.”

Now they’ve unveiled their change-the-world starting point – low speed automated taxis to serve, initially, their employees moving between buildings in their spread-out complex in Mountain View, California. Vehicles would be summoned with a smartphone to pick up and drop off passengers at the doorstep. Service would be opened up to the public from there. Ultimately the plan is to serve disabled and elderly people who cannot drive but want full mobility.

Google’s fleet of 100 vehicles – which they’ve designed – are not an adaptation of the common car, even though they’re being built in Detroit. Their footprint is somewhat like the Fiat 500 or the Smart city cars currently on the roads, but that’s where the similarities end. They have no steering wheel, brakes, or accelerator pedal – just a start/stop button. Their speed is capped at 25 mph;

a speed range in which safety regulations for crashworthiness are typically not as stringent, an important factor for building vehicles from the ground up.

This summer Google will begin testing these vehicles with their own drivers. After that, they aim to run a small pilot program in California “in the next couple of years” (within the bounds of California’s recently published autonomous vehicle testing regulations). Based on the results, they say they’ll “work with partners” to bring it to market.

Their concept is quite similar to the work done in Europe in the CyberCar and CityMobil projects over the last decade or so. In the current CityMobil2 project, small urban automated vehicles are being deployed in six-month demonstrations in five cities. Plus, in 2017 Volvo Cars is offering automated production vehicles to members of the public for their DriveMe trial across 50 km of roads in and around Gothenburg. Yes, the media will continue to froth over Google, but clearly a wide range of key players are active as well.

Google says the auto industry’s incremental approach – asking humans to monitor automation and be ready to step back into the control loop, whether immediately or with a time buffer – is flawed because humans are, well, human. As we gain confidence in our self-driving vehicles (and this happens very quickly based on my experience and affirmed by Google founder Sergey Brin in interviews), we are going to get engrossed in something other than the road scene, or take a nap. We may not be “there” when our car needs us.

❝You can get a lot more fired up in the morning when you’re thinking about changing the world rather than making an incremental improvement on something❞

Don’t assume, however, that the incremental approach is impossible for the car industry. This goes back to personal responsibility. It goes to well-informed users and well-designed human interfaces. It goes to fail-operational systems when the human does not step in. All of which is well within the capability of the auto industry. Some will do it better than others, and there will be the inevitable viral videos and debates. But it will nevertheless happen.

Google’s move has huge significance. After stimulating the entire automotive industry and fascinating the public with the initial unveiling of their self-driving car in 2010, speculation about where they’re going to take it has been endless. Now we see they have crystalized their focus on urban mobility. This is a good fit with the “mobility as a service” concept. A future offering would involve a service provider who owns the vehicles, maintains and tests them to high standards, and limits geographic range to stay within pre-mapped areas “approved” for automated operation. Cars sold to private owners are obviously much more difficult to monitor and limiting their geographic usage is not a great sales proposition.

And, by offering vehicles without traditional controls, Google is creating even more distance from the car companies, staking out their domain even more definitively.

In the ideal case, Google’s automated taxi performs superbly and the concept takes off, “ploughing the ground” for the larger market served by the automakers to build widespread trust in automated driving technology. Let’s watch what happens – we in the ITS world have ringside seats.

Richard Bishop is principal of Bishop Consulting and Associate Editor of Thinking Highways North [email protected]; www.auvsi.org; www.vehicleautomation.org Follow Richard at #ThinkingCarsH3B


THE VIEW Taking the Initiative

Traffic radio may be making a comeback – but why did it go away in the first place?

Paul Hutton

“Motorists are being encouraged to not miss a thing and keep

up to date on their journey by using digital radio” screamed the subject line of a British Government press release which burst into my inbox recently.

The crux of the release was that digital radio in cars was growing and people who have digital radio would be able to keep “up to date”, although quite what they were to “keep up to date” with was not specified. Steam started coming from my ears. Why?

Because if you put “keeping up to date” and “cars” together, you must therefore conclude that one of the things you may wish to “keep up to date” with is traffic information. This release was suggesting it should be via DAB radio.

This has annoyed me somewhat because the British Government, in England anyway through its Highways Agency, used to have its own Traffic Radio station, reporting on jams and incidents 24/7 on DAB. You could say I was quite close to it because in one former role I was part of the team that started the station, and later was the Managing Director of the company that provided the contract.

The station was launched in the mid-2000s when there weren’t that many in-car digital radio sets but it had to be digital because the analogue spectrum (AM and FM) was so frequencies were unavailable. We knew that building an audience would take a while but even with a relatively low in-car audience, research we conducted suggested the benefit to the wider economy was greater than the cost of the service, and

the service kept getting more popular as in-car DAB and streaming of radio grew.

Then a rather unhelpful article in a Sunday newspaper, coinciding with budget cuts, led to the station being closed down just as the gradient of a graph of in-car DAB take-up started to rise significantly, and just before the Olympics when traveller information was seen as vital.

Hence, me being somewhat irked at the Government’s support for us to “keep up to date” when it had shut down something we could use to do exactly that. Maybe they’re planning to bring it back, which would delight me (and would delight me even more if they call me up and ask my advice!). Or maybe the person who wrote this release had no idea the Government had ever had a traffic station on DAB in the first place.

This led me to think about what other projects may have been tried out, ended and then disappeared into the ether. I have done some relatively simple Googling and haven’t found anything which looks like a repository of old ideas. (Forgive me if one exists and I’m ignorant of it, if that’s the case please email me and let me know.)

There’s the Biblical line about

❝A rather unhelpful articlein a Sunday newspaper led to the stationbeing closed down just as the take-up of DABstarted to rise significantly❞

“nothing new under the sun”, and that’s very true of ideas. Traffic Radio was a reworking of ITIS “Travel Now”, and the current excellent INRIX Internet service “Travel Radio” is a reworking of the Highways Agency’s station.

How many old ideas and projects have been done, filed away and forgotten, when in fact many of the lessons learned and mistakes made could be valuable in current and future work, if only it were made available and people knew where to look? I know the HA has a “knowledge compendium” but it doesn’t cover everything and is not well known. When taxpayers’ money has been used, surely it’s important for that work to get maximum return in whatever way it can be?

And there are so many things which have cross-border usefulness that projects in one country or region should be clearly documented, with lessons learned and mistakes made, summarised and tagged to make it easy to find.

A CHANGE OF HATPrivate companies might even want to take part, too. They may not wish to share current work but after a period of time publicise what worked and what didn’t to improve projects and allow people to dream up new, better ideas based on what has gone before.

With my consultant’s hat on, such a thing might cost me work because expertise is freely available online which I would otherwise be able to charge for, but for the greater good – not only in ITS but across industry – I think it’s vital.

But if anyone does create such a thing, could they please keep me up to date with progress?

Paul Hutton is head of H3B Media’s Broadcast Services Division, founder of PH Initiatives and presenter of our Thinking Aloud podcast. [email protected]; www.phinitiatives.com; thinkinghighways.com/podcasts; thinkingaloudpodcast.com

Encouraging the use of in-car digital radio for traffic information is not a new idea, so why was a perfectly good service shut down as DAB radio was just taking off?


THE VIEW European Transport Financing

A car-vignette for foreigners using German Autobahns

Dr Andreas Kossak

German car owners have to pay for the use of certain roads in foreign countries.

Foreign car owners use German roads for free. That is not fair and no longer acceptable. In order to make sure that they adequately contribute to the infrastructure costs, a vignette must be introduced for the use of the German Autobahns by foreign car-owners. That was the repeatedly stated position of the Bavarian Christian Social Party (CSU) during the Federal election campaign in Germany last year. The CSU is the sister- and coalition-party of the reigning Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

After the victory of the “black” parties, the Bavarian governor and chief of the CSU claimed that he would not sign any coalition contract for the upcoming legislative period that does not include the “car-vignette for foreigners” – connected to the condition that no German car-owner has to pay any additional cent in this context. The price of a vignette being valid for one year was proclaimed to be €100. Meanwhile the coalition contract was signed. It includes the “firm intention” to introduce a car-vignette for foreigners compatible with the relevant EU-regulations. The new Federal Minister of Transport is a Bavarian from the CSU.

A TAXING ISSUEA fundamental principle of the European Union is the non-discrimination of foreigners. That means in this case that a vignette may only be introduced, if residents and

foreigners are treated equal in the respective regard. In order to comply with the demanded condition that no German car owner should suffer any additional burden, it is stated by the Minister of Transport that the vehicle tax in Germany will be reduced by €100. That sounds simple but the approach contains numerous questionable aspects and components respectively:• The share of foreign cars using

German Autobahns amount to only about 6 per cent (in terms of traffic-performance).

• The transaction-/enforcement-system however will have to include 100 per cent of the users.

• As a consequence of these two facts the net-revenue would be comparably low – if there would be any at all.

• According to EU regulations vignettes must be offered split into different periods of time (for example: year, month, week, day – for foreigners and residents).

• A substantial part of the German car owners pay less than €100 vehicle tax per year; and: what about the car-owners intending not to use the Autobahns or only to use them few times a year?

• A direct coupling of the introduction of the vignette with the reduction of the vehicle-tax for residents would not comply with EU-law.

Nevertheless the Federal Minister of Transport announced that the details of the project will be published before the 2014 summer holiday season and that the vignette-system will

❝The whole “affair” is a typical example for the handling of tolling road use by politicians to date – not only in Germany❞

be “activated” on 1 January 2016. In fact there are some viable

tricks to make the system work without directly violating EU-law – in particular decoupling the introduction of the vignette and the reduction of the vehicle tax. However, the approach as a whole is basically founded neither logical nor fair:• In those European countries, were

time-related tolls (eight countries out of EU 27 + three) or distant related tolls (nine countries) are collected, the residents have to pay the same like foreigners.

• A toll for all foreign car-owners using German Autobahns will have to be paid as well by car-owners being residents in countries where no tolls for any road use are collected.

• The tax-burden of German car-owners does not exceed the average tax burden of foreigners from other EU member countries.

Taking all that into account, the other EU member countries (in particular the neighbouring countries of Germany) have more than enough good reasons for protesting against the respective plans, and they yet announced to do so. On the other hand, the whole “affair” is a typical example for the handling of tolling road use by politicians to date – not only in Germany. The internationally renowned director of the British “Royal Automobile Club Foundation” Prof. Stephen Glaister, marked that in 2011 by stating “there is still considerable ignorance and misunderstanding about it”.

Not very much has changed since then, sadly.

Dr Andreas Kossak is Principal of AK Research & Consulting, based in Hamburg, [email protected]

Reinventing Transportation in our Connected WorldSeptember 7-11 | Detroit, Michigan

Produced by:

Co-hosts:

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Shows within shows…

It’s always nice to see the audience fig-ures for Thinking Aloud, the Thinking Highways podcast, and how many

people enjoy listening to our on-demand radio programmes from various major ITS events around the world.

But when we were at Intertraffic in Amsterdam I actually had an audi-ence whilst I was making a programme, because I was putting the whole thing together whilst seated at the Thinking Highways stand.

One of the beauties of modern tech-nology is the ability to do things remotely that used to require specific equipment in a specific place. Aside from the fact we wouldn’t be able to easily disseminate the programme, 20 years or so ago we’d never have had the ability to build a 30-minute news programme from remote locations without transporting tape machines and tape, sound mixers, microphones and the various paraphernalia that went with creating radio programmes (including old fashioned tape-splicing razor blades which they might not let on the plane these days!).

Now, with some (fairly expensive) software, a decent audio recorder and the knowledge of what to do, we can create a programme from anywhere. That’s why I was able to sit at a desk in the middle of the world’s biggest traffic conference and create four episodes of Thinking Aloud.

It’s also why I’ve previously put these shows together in airport lounges, on aeroplanes themselves and even with my Macbook perched on an ironing board in the apartment we were renting during last year’s ITS Europe Congress in Dublin (the laundry room was the only place we had wifi, you understand).

Our “Live from” series highlight so far this year was at Intertraffic, where we

delivered a series of programmes inter-viewing some old and new contributors to the programme, learning about eve-rything from radar-based lighting con-trols to smart ANPR cameras which can determine the make, model and colour of a car as well as its license plate.

These programmes were sponsored by AGD Systems, Nicander, Swarco, Vitronic and WDM. And I’d like to espe-cially thank our sponsors for their ongo-ing support, without whom we simply wouldn’t have Thinking Aloud.

APPOINTMENT TO LISTENOur programmes are very popular with listeners because they bring an almost summary of what’s going on at the major shows. People watching me make the show in Amsterdam told me that they like to download it to their phones in the morning and listen to it en route to the event. When they get there they already have a feel for what’s worth see-ing, and more than one piece of business has been done thanks to people hearing about an new initiative and therefore heading straight to the relevant stand to find out more.

Sponsors do get their money’s worth from supporting the programmes. Although anyone with a story to tell can get on Thinking Aloud (we don’t charge you to be a part of the programme), we will always include interviews with our sponsors. They get a radio-style advert in each programme, three sponsor credits, logos and links on our website and on emails to the thousands of people on the Thinking Highways database (and some-times the event’s database too) and also in the magazine. Like in this article, for example!

As well as Amsterdam, we’ve been

in Athens for ASECAP’s Study and Information Days (with thanks to DBA Lab), and also in Leipzig for an International Transport Forum side-event brought to you by the PTV Group that I moderated and recorded at the same time. Listeners got to hear four of Europe’s leading experts on logistics debate how the logistics sector fits into governmental planning in cities. The session itself was about an hour and a quarter long, so we split it into two pro-grammes, edited out gaps and produced two half-hour podcasts which are well worth a listen, if I say so myself.

FIND US IN FINLANDKevin Borras will be our man in Helsinki for the ITS Europe Congress (another handy use of technology is that I can edit the files even if I’m not at the event) and then we’re planning our major road-show of the year – the World Congress in Detroit in September, which looks like (according to an interview which you’ll hear on one of our Intertraffic bonus shows) it’ll be a great event.

We look forward to seeing you there, and if enough people watch me doing the production, we may even get a round of applause.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Paul Hutton is the head of H3B

Media’s Broadcast Services Division

[email protected]

thinkinghighways.com/podcaststhinkinglaooudpodcast.com

For more information about sponsorship opportunities for Thinking Aloud, email Paul at [email protected]

H3B MEDIA BROADCAST SERVICES Thinking Aloud podcasts

Paul Hutton looks back on another busy few weeks on the road for the Thinking Aloud production team Podcast LISTEN NOW AT

http://thinkinghighways.com/ category/podcasts


Listen to how the industry is thinking

H3B Media Broadcast Services thanks the sponsors of our Thinking Aloud Podcasts for their support!

Thinking Aloud Live From TRB, Washington, DC

Documentary Podcast ENFORCEMENT

Thinking Aloud Live From ISE, Amsterdam

Documentary Podcast MACHINE VISION

Thinking Aloud Live From Intertraffic, Amsterdam

Documentary Podcast THINKING CITIES

Thinking Aloud Live From International Transport Forum, Leipzig

Documentary Podcast SMART MOBILITY

Thinking Aloud Live From ASECAP Study & Information Days, Athens

Documentary Podcast SMART SAFETY SOLUTIONS

READER SERVICES

Axis..................................................25

Barco..............outside back cover

Crown.International................61

DBA.Lab........................................41

FLIR.ITS........................................33

IRD..................................................43

Iteris................................................... 9

ITS.Europe.Congress.2014...................inside back cover

ITS.World.Congress.2014.....69

JAI..................... inside front cover

Jupiter.............................................21

Moxa...............................................29

PTV.................................................37

Siemens............................................ 7

Smart.Microwave.Systems....11

Swarco.............................................. 3

Thinking Cities............................61

Thinking Aloud.Podcast.........71

TSS...................................................72

Vitronic..........................................13

Vysionics.......................................53

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ADVERTISERS

For all enquiries regarding advertising in Thinking.Highways and other H3B Media products please contact Luis Hill at [email protected] tel. +44 (0)20 3463 9485

To continue receiving the Europe/Rest of the World edition make sure your registration does not expire

Go online now to register FREE at thinkinghighways.com

DON’T MISS OUT ON YOUR COPY OF

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thinkinghighways.com Volume 9 Number 2 June/July 2014


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EUROPE AND REST OF THE WORLD EDITION









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INTERNATIONAL ROAD DYNAMICS INC.www.irdinc.com | [email protected]

VISIT US AT STAND

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Highway Toll Collection Traffic Data Collection Systems

Commercial VehicleEnforcement/Operations

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Download an Aimsun 8 free trial version for Windows, Mac or Linux

from www.aimsun.comor contact [email protected]

for features and pricing.

Traffic modelingwithout boundaries

dynamic traffic assignment in a

single, easy-to-use package

meso and micro simulation and

Travel demand modeling, hybrid

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See us on Stand 11.130

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READER SERVICES

AGD Systems .....................IFC

ASECAP Days 2014 ............ 69

Axis Communications ....OBC

Barco ...................................... 21

Crown International ............ 61

eyevis ..................................... 57

FLIR ....................................... 37

International Road Dynamics .....47

Iteris ......................................... 9

ITS Europe Congress 2014 .. IBC

ITS World Congress 2014 .... 77

JAI ........................................... 35

Jupiter .................................... 19

Moxa ...................................... 27

PTV Group ........................... 47

Siemens ................................... 7

Smart Microwave Systems .. 11

Swarco ..................................... 3

Thinking Aloud

Podcast sponsors .................. 79

Thinking Cities ...................... 61

TSS ......................................... 80

Videotec ................................. 51

Vitronic .................................. 13

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ADVERTISERS

For all enquiries regarding advertising in Thinking Highways and other H3B Media products please contact Luis Hill at [email protected] tel. +44 (0)20 3463 9485

To continue receiving the Europe/Rest of the World edition make sure your registration does not expire

Go online now to register FREE at thinkinghighways.com

DON’T MISS OUT ON YOUR COPY OF

What happens today is in your hands. Whether you’re faced with congestion, accidents or severe weather, it’s your job to keep the traffic moving. And it’s our job to help you. Our smart traffic monitoring solutions will take you straight to the heart of the action, so you can make the right move, at the right time – every time.Make your next move now, visit www.axis.com/yourtraffic

Your Traffic.Your Move.

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● INTERTRAFFIC PREVIEW ● CROWDSOURCING ● FINLAND ● CALM ● TWO NEW COLUMNS ●

thinkinghighways.com Volume 9 Number 1 March/April 2014

Possessive caseBob Williams investigates the curious case of vehicle data ownership

Protect and survive

Made in Taiwan

Paul Hutton talks smart safety solutions with a panel of experts

How to reap the benefits of a user-pays ETC system

EUROPE AND REST OF THE WORLD EDITION


TECHNOLOGYKeeping a watchful eye on Marseille’s crucial tunnel network, p24

MOBILITYHow ecomobility is helping Europe steer towards a more sustainable future, p34

DESIGNWhat needs to be considered when creating a new traffic product, p52

RESEARCHElena de la Peña introduces the International Road Research Board, p66

Smart Safety Solutions documentary available NOW!

PLUS: Listen to our range of podcasts!

Podcast LISTEN NOW ATthinkinghighways.com/podcasts

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thinking highways - europe and rest of the world edition - june/july 2014

Documents

number of video

jais new viscam

world edition volume

open data

traffic control centrefinnish

english traffic project

lens light sensing

multislope high dynamic