Smarter transport remains key to smart cities
Smarter transport remains key to smart cities
First publishedin ITS International 2017NovemberDecember asMaking strides towards smarter cities
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Colin Sowman looks at some of the challenges and solutions that will provide enhanced transport efficiency in tomorrow’s smarter cities.
However you define a ‘smart city’, one of the key ingredients will be an efficient transport system. As most governments and city authorities face financial constraints, incremental improvements in the existing systems is the most likely way forward.
In London, new trains and signalling are improving the capacity of the Underground but that then reveals previously dormant bottlenecks in passenger tunnels and ticket halls, at the barriers and even when boarding and leaving the trains.
At its London Innovation Centre, Cubic is evaluating some solutions, including a self-configuring ticket barrier which automatically reverses direction depending on which way most people are moving at the time. So instead of having underused gates for travellers heading in the ‘wrong’ direction, the new gates use real-time data to dictate the gateline configuration.
Cubic's Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) system being tested at Paddington Station.
The system counts the size of the crowd using paired infra-red sensors with top-down location awareness to evaluate the balance between those entering and exiting a station and automatically reconfigures the gates to relieve any crowd build-up.
Similar technology is being developed to evaluate the number of people boarding and alighting from underground trains to identify which carriages have more space for people to board. Sending that information ahead to the next station enables travellers on the platform to congregate in areas corresponding to the emptier carriages and to board faster.
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