Making the buses and trains run on time and keeping traffic congestion under control is a challenge in any city. Lately, the city of Zhenjiang, China, has been trying out a system from IBM that will let traffic managers not only see what is happening but react before problems show up.
Using many sources of data -- GPS from taxicabs, buses and cell phones, as well as local cameras, sensors near traffic lights and even Twitter feeds -- the system provides an operations center with a real-time map of all the traffic.
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Currently a lot of cities have something close to this. The "jam cams" in New York, for example, show people what's happening at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. But even real-time information only allows traffic managers to react. The real secret to keeping gridlock away is predictive analytics. That is, compiling data from all these sources to be able to say where traffic will be bad and fix the problem before it gets to gridlock.
Vinohd Swaminathan, IBM's director for smarter cities transportation, said the IBM system in Zhenjiang can predict with 95 percent accuracy what will happen up to an hour in the future.
Swaminathan noted when people react to problems (say, a fender bender at a busy intersection) what often ends up happening is you create other problems elsewhere. Giving a computer model data to work with and combining it with real time information allows traffic managers to avoid that, sometimes by rerouting motorists in an area far removed from the actual problem.
The big change people would notice, he said, is response times to incidents -- getting the police and emergency crews to the point where there is an emergency faster. In cities like Zhenjiang, which depends on a network of buses and taxis, it can also mean dispatching more buses on certain routes at certain times.
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China isn't the only country where experiments like this are happening. In California people can sign up to have their cell phone location data tracked when they travel. The data is then used to tell the person something like what the best way to get to work is that day -- do you avoid the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge or not? Rio de Janeiro uses a weather prediction system that works on small scales -- one square kilometer at a time -- in order to help disaster agencies coordinate.
Such smart systems are becoming a necessity, since budgets are strained and adding roads isn't always an option. "We aren't just going to build our way out of this," Swaminathan said.
Above photo: traffic congestion in Shanghai
Image: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons
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