22-09-2016, 02:50 PM
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Executive Summary
The rapidly increasing vehicle population in India, spurred by the population boom and economic upturn
lays a critical burden on traffic management in the metropolitan cities and towns of the country. The
cumulative growth of the Passenger Vehicles segment in India during April 2007 – March 2008 was 12.17
percent. In 2007-08 alone, 9.6 million motorised vehicles were sold in India. Economy-induced automobile
usage is complicated further by the constant influx of rural population into urban areas, thus making
enormous demands on the transportation infrastructure in an overloaded region. The heterogeneity of
economy and the physical limit on how much additional infrastructure a city can hold complicate transport
management further. World Bank reports that the economic losses incurred on account of congestion and
poor roads alone run as high as $6 billion a year in India.
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is an established route to resolve, or at least minimize traffic
problems. ITS encompass all modes of transportation - air, sea, road and rail, and intersects various
components of each mode - vehicles, infrastructure, communication and operational systems. Various
countries have developed strategies and techniques, based on their geographic, cultural, socio-economic and
environmental background, to integrate the various components into an interrelated system. In general, any
of the ITS applications uses a Traffic Management Centre (TMC) where data is collected, analysed and
combined with other operational and control concepts to manage the complex transportation problems.
Typically, several agencies share the administration of transport infrastructure, through a network of traffic
operation centres. There is often, a localized distribution of data and information and the centres adopt
different criteria to achieve the goals of traffic management. This inter-dependent autonomy in operations
and decision-making is essential because of the heterogeneity of demand and performance characteristics of
interacting subsystems.
The major objective of ITS is to evaluate, develop, analyse and integrate new sensor, information, and
communication technologies and concepts to achieve traffic efficiency, improve environmental quality, save
energy, conserve time, and enhance safety and comfort for drivers, pedestrians, and other traffic groups.
The adoption of location and information based technologies into vehicles, infrastructure, traffic
management and traveler information services have shown dramatic improvements in the safe, and efficient
mobility of people and freight in USA, European nations, Japan, Middle East and Canada.
While India has already made a foray into ITS in organizing traffic, more extensive and urgent integration of
advanced technology and concepts into mainstream traffic management is imperative. ITS is still in its
infancy in India, with decision-makers, key planners and agencies in the process of understanding its
potential. A number of prototype ITS projects have been introduced in various cities in India which have
focused on isolated deployments of parking information, area-wide signal control, and advanced toll
collection. Most of these are single-city based pilot studies. At present, there are only few fully developed
ITS applications with traffic management centers in India.
Developments in ITS are driven strongly by socio-economic needs, and environmental demands. In India,
the diverse range of vehicular velocities (pedestrian, bicycle, LMV's, HMV's, animal drawn carts), wide
variety of vehicles (including pedestrian traffic), and poor lane discipline (partially resulting from the first
two factors and partially due to cultural reasons) and a very high population density makes adoption of
Western ITS standards and architecture difficult. The Indian ITS must be designed to suit the Indian
scenario and will ideally be an interplay of public and private sectors. On the public sector front, ITS will be
designed based on regional and national standards to suit the specific region.