Managing smart transport systems

Smart systems of transport have come up recently with government of India about to spend 1400 crs over next two years as incentives and subsidies for maker and buyer of electric vehicle. It intends to have 6mn electric vehicles by 2020 in India. There are big plans for converting river stretches to transport goods and passengers to cheaper national highways.

The use of intelligent traffic lighting systems, bio fuels and lessening road accidents would be the paradigm of development. Thereby there would be better visibility for urban transport systems and those surrounding these cities would get efficient traffic, timelier repairs, road safety and faster commutes. Reduction in fuel costs and carbon dioxide emissions would lead to improvement in road transport. While in international cities there could be integrated technologies for urbanization, there are even better smart transport alternatives coming up in cities across India, Kigali, Rwanda and Tanzania.

There is possibility of mass transport systems from proprietary solutions making these in place for smart transport. Smart cities would develop advanced traffic management systems, cameras, message signs, detectors, websites and mobile apps to support. Remote access for monitoring and adjusting timing of traffic signals would be employed; also a system of planned road transport exigencies could be implemented like in Kenya called the UPLAN platform.

When the aim is for managing smart transport then the systems used across cities could be called the intelligent transport systems or ITS. These systems of transport management have been around for sometime though now they feature newer applications like traffic predictions, decision supports, advisory, ticketing and fare collections. Better sensors, radio frequency tags and global positioning systems can also be used in Smart Transport. Predicting traffic can help model planning for better continuous system wide performance track and strategies development. Three key aspects adhered to by ITS are governance, transport network optimization and integrated transport systems. Comparing global leading practices to benchmark ITS would validate and develop better implementation techniques or roadmap. As these systems of traffic management provide experience based learning and programs, it would be a challenge in India and can be addressed with integrated approach leveraging advanced technologies and intelligent solutions. Smart transport systems need to undertake viable options for sustenance and monitoring of progress. As this is quite vague there needs to be sufficient training and ground breaking for achieving target of smart transport. Such ITS technologies in collaboration could produce better outcome for smart transport.

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