Traffic Management: Caught in the Lane

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

Over the years, he has seen the construction of many new
flyovers. They succeeded in easing congestion for a while, but increasing
vehicular traffic soon caught up, and it was the same old story of hour-long
snarls all over again. Aditya has often wondered what it would take to ease
Mumbai's traffic woes.

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

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

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

A piece of statistic from the Mumbai Traffic Police web site
illustrates the magnitude of the problem. While the length of roads in Mumbai
increased 127% between 1951 and 2004, the population increased 301% and the
number of vehicles a whopping 3,109%.

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

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

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

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

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

The results were impressive indeed. The traffic in central
London went down 10-15%, and traffic speeds went up by a similar percentage. In
fact, what made the London Congestion Charging Project such a success was the
technology that backed the whole process.

A Tech Solution

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

Instead, a network of cameras records the number plates of
vehicles entering the city center. An automatic number plate recognition (ANPR)
system grabs the live video stream of vehicles, converts them to still images,
uses certain in-built business logic to identify the number plate from the
image, then applies optical character recognition (OCR) tools and converts the
number plates into text.

What this means is that the ANPR system then digs into the
database that stores the vehicle registration numbers, matches them against the
numbers captured through the live traffic stream and then uses the attached
information to charge vehicle owners. Hence, charges could be collected without
slowing down traffic in any way.

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

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

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

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

Ravindra Kadam

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

The Author is Head of Solutions and Strategy, Mastek group