Groupement ITS INFRA : Systèmes de Transports Intelligents et Infrastructures

As ride-sharing and electric cars take off, governments are seeking new ways to make drivers pay.

IN 1868 the world’s first traffic light was installed outside the Houses of Parliament. The gaslit signal controlled the flow of London carriages—at least for a few weeks. For, soon enough, the gas ignited. The resulting explosion knocked the helmet off a policeman’s head, and left him badly burned.

Efforts to ease congestion no longer literally blow up in your face, but recent schemes have run into trouble, too. In 2003 Ken Livingstone, then London’s mayor, introduced a congestion-charging zone (CCZ). Motorists pay up to £11.50 a day ($15.20) to drive into the centre of the city. Since 2000 the number of cars entering central London has fallen by nearly a quarter. But congestion is rising again (see chart 1), a result of vans and taxis clocking up more miles within the zone, as well as new lanes for buses and Lycra-clad commuters that have reduced the road space for cars. More minutes are lost to delays than before the CCZ. The average vehicle speed has fallen from 19.9 miles (32.0km) per hour in 2013 to 17.7mph (28.5kph) in 2016.

In response, London, like other heaving parts of the world, is looking at a more radical approach to reduce congestion. In January the London Assembly, the elected body that oversees the mayor, published a report calling for the city to develop a system of road-pricing that varies by when, how much and where drivers use the roads. Singapore, which already has the world’s most comprehensive road-pricing system, is introducing a new one in 2020 that uses cars’ global positioning systems (GPS) to charge motorists more precisely. Other schemes are being tried out in American states such as California and Oregon.

All of which pleases economists. Using prices to ration a scarce resource, such as space on busy roads at busy times, makes sense. Those who consume a good should pay for it. Road-pricing is also more efficient than the typical ways drivers are charged for imposing costs on others: taxes on fuel and on car ownership. Neither penalises driving in congested conditions, which causes extra pollution and crimps productivity by delaying workers and deliveries, and disrupting supply chains. And although congestion zones help, they are blunt instruments; ideally, road pricing would adjust to traffic flows in real time.

Yet economists are not normal people. Most voters hate taxes on driving. Even if they grudgingly accept existing ones, they squeal about any increases. In Britain, which Margaret Thatcher called a “great car-owning democracy”, duties on fuel have been frozen since 2011 following pressure from drivers’ groups. Nineteen American states have not raised their “gas taxes” in at least a decade; Oklahoma’s levy has been frozen for 30 years.

The not-so-fast and the furious

Many drivers would rather “pay” by queuing than through road-pricing. The Netherlands hoped to run a 60,000-vehicle trial of road-pricing in 2011, on the way to a nationwide scheme. But opposition politicians and motoring organisations fought so hard that the plans were dropped.

Governments will nevertheless soon have to find new ways of making drivers pay. That is not because congestion will worsen otherwise—though it will. Rather, tax revenue from motoring is drying up.

One reason for this is the spread of ride-hailing and ride-sharing. In London drivers for firms like Uber can circulate all day inside the CCZ, picking up fares, while being exempt from the charge. The number of private-hire vehicles that entered the zone at least once rose from 50,000 in March 2013 to 85,000 in November 2016. The number of licensed drivers rose from 67,000 to 115,500 over the same period. (In the future self-driving cars may replace these workers, further depleting government coffers, since there will be fewer car owners to tax.) In total private-hire vehicles make up 38% of car traffic in central London, almost double the share of traditional black taxis.

The second reason for dwindling revenue—increasingly efficient cars—is even more important. Cars’ fuel efficiency has roughly doubled in the past 25 years (see chart 2). Partly as a result, the tax take from fuel and vehicle duties in Britain has declined by £812m per year in real terms over the past five years, according to Gergely Raccuja, an economist who on July 13th won the Wolfson prize, an economics competition run by Policy Exchange, a British think-tank, for a paper on road taxation. During the same period the total amount of miles driven increased.

Electric vehicles will further widen the gap between traffic and taxes. Paal Brevik Wangsness of the Institute of Transport Economics in Norway, the country where electric-car ownership is highest, points out that electric vehicles not only incur no fuel duty, but often attract government subsidies. British drivers, for example, can get £4,500 off the cost of electric cars such as a Nissan Leaf or a Tesla Model X. Even if these types of subsidies fall as cars become cheaper, they will require infrastructure such as charging points and cables.

Get your motor runnin’

For Mr Raccuja, a fair and radical way to pay for the costs of car use would be to scrap duties on fuel and ownership, and replace them with a “road tax”. His new levy would be a per-mile charge that varied depending on a car’s weight and emissions, thereby making drivers with road-crushing and air-polluting vehicles pay more. Mr Raccuja notes that the charge could also be higher in more congested places.

Such schemes will doubtless infuriate motorists. But there are reasons to believe that a shift toward road-pricing is not just increasingly urgent, but also more plausible. London’s CCZ was brought in against stiff opposition. Today just one-fifth of Londoners oppose the idea of a more sophisticated road-pricing scheme, according to the London Assembly. After a seven-month trial in 2006, Stockholm residents voted narrowly by 53% to 47% to make the city’s congestion zone permanent. But by 2011 polls showed that about 70% of residents backed the scheme.

Car owners may become less of a political force, at least in cities, as people opt against getting behind the wheel. In many rich countries the share of 20-somethings with driving licences is falling. The number of car-less households in America declined from 1960, when the US Census began tracking it, until 2010, since when the tally has begun to tick up. McKinsey, a consultancy, estimates that one in ten vehicles sold by 2030 will be for ride-sharing.

Technology will also make it easier to try road-pricing, including in poorer cities like Jakarta and Bangkok, where traffic is horrific. In the past, schemes might have relied on cameras to recognise number plates. Today transponders can ping a radio signal used to track a car’s movement. But even that gizmo will soon be obsolete. Many premium vehicles are already connected to the internet using mobile-phone networks. By 2020 most new cars will come with these connections as standard. Together with GPS technology that means it will become easier to track the use of vehicles wherever they are.

Singapore is the model others will try to follow. The world’s first CCZ was introduced there in 1975. It used paper permits to control access to a central zone until switching to electronic sensors in 2008. If average speeds are deemed too slow over a three-month period, then the city raises the cost of entrance. According to Woo Sian Boon of Singapore’s Land Transport Authority, congestion has fallen as motorists have switched to less busy routes or to the city-state’s public transport, or travelled at off-peak times when charges are low.

From 2020 Singapore will take an even more sophisticated approach. It will use GPS to vary the amount drivers pay based on distance, time, location and vehicle. The scheme will reduce the need for the unsightly gantries that log drivers in and out. Drivers will receive real-time information about the cost and busyness of roads, encouraging them to consider other routes.

Although less ambitious than Singapore’s plans, several American states are using technology to experiment, too. The likes of California and Colorado have accepted federal grants for trials of various pay-to-drive schemes. The biggest, OReGO in Oregon, started in 2015. Around 1,500 people have signed up. Drivers have devices fitted in their cars that take data from the engines’ computers. The gadgets record the amount of fuel used and distance driven, and transmit the data via mobile networks. Motorists are charged based on how far they drive, with each mile costing 1.5 cents, whatever the location or time. Any state fuel tax they have paid (30 cents a gallon) is refunded.

The aim of OReGO is relatively narrow: to find a way to protect state taxes on motoring, even as cars become more fuel-efficient. Whether it will replace the state fuel tax is unclear. Nevertheless, innovative schemes such as OReGO may start to weaken the taboo against new taxes.

They also raise concerns about how motorists’ data are used. Tech firms and carmakers are competing for access to the reams of data that drivers create. This can be used to sell them additional services based on location (take a journey on a hot day and your car may tell you where to pull in for an ice cream), the state of their vehicle (by using sensors to suggest maintenance) or the way they drive (by sharing data with insurance companies). Firms can also aggregate data to help create the algorithms for driverless vehicles.

Although Singapore’s authorities may not fret much about privacy, others do. The American Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group, has been active in Oregon; it worries about data leaking or being stolen. In 2015 the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a think-tank, pointed out that it is often unclear who owns drivers’ data and whether they are anonymised.

Head out on the highway

Clearing this up is possible. And once motorists have become used to the idea of paying for the road space they take up, rates could be tweaked to account for the noise, pollution and the risk of collisions in each location. For the time being governments, national and metropolitan, are proceeding cautiously. But as fuel-tax revenues dry up, that is sure to change.

Source: The Economist, August 3rd, 2017 - This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "The price of jam"

For the system to work, only 10% of the vehicles are connected to the route optimization network.

Road traffic is undoubtedly the area where human irrationality is most damaging. We are building more and more traffic lanes around cities, bearing in mind a totally erroneous assumption: on the road, individuals behave in such a way as to encourage regular and efficient driving and to deter dangerous and anarchic driving . Thus, attempts are made to circulate unbelievable quantities of cars in a limited space, at a speed high enough for the traffic to be fluid.

Obviously, it does not work. Why ? Because human behavior in no way resembles the ideal behavior that is modeled to predict the evolution of traffic. People stuck in the corks start and accelerate abruptly as soon as the car that precedes them advances three meters, a rainy weather favors nervousness and unwarranted slowdowns, and finally, everyone presses the brake pedal.

Because there are prudent drivers, unwary drivers, impulsive persons, softheads and heads-up specialists in driving, there is really no "typical driving" that would make predictions Accurate information on the state of traffic in a time t. Consequences: most metropolises are so congested that one would gain to go to work in hang-gliding.

In recent years, urban planners, engineers and other prospective urban prospects have imagined that the emergence of autonomous cars will solve all the traffic problems of the world. If we could get rid of the irrational behavior of humans behind the wheel by delegating car steering to an AI, then we could seriously streamline road traffic. The problem is that all these jovial experts had not foreseen that the public would be reluctant to entrust its destiny to an intelligent system. They had also not foreseen that in 2017, the horizon of the fully functional autonomous car would still be very distant.

While waiting for this blessed day, computer scientists at Nanyang Technology University have developed a new intelligent routing algorithm that reduces the frequency of "spontaneous traffic jams" - the accumulations of cars caused by the convergence of several traffic lanes . It is an extremely fast distributed computing system that meets all the requirements of a real-time traffic management system. The work of the researchers is described in the April issue of IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence.

Routing (or route selection) is a traditional branch of computing. Here, it is more precisely to rely on the theory of graphs, a domain that used algorithms long before the first electronic computer was built. The problem is that routing algorithms can be extremely complex, even when they have to manage only a small number of possible actors and paths. Real road traffic requires calculations involving a large number of roads, cars and other agents (such as traffic lights).

The algorithm of Nanyang researchers starts from the assumption that from a certain density of circulation, the problems will emerge on their own. At one point or another, a driver will inevitably take a bad initiative that will disrupt the traffic until it breaks down. This technical term means that for a certain period of time, on a given route segment, the outgoing traffic will be less than the incoming traffic.

"We assume that we already have a good traffic allocation model and that the probability of a traffic disruption is greater than zero (meaning that at some point there will necessarily be a slowdown or a traffic jam). Our goal is to redirect the flow of traffic so that the probability of traffic breakdown is reduced to the maximum, "write Hongliang Guo and his colleagues. In other words, "our objective is to maximize the probability that none of the roads in the system will be subject to traffic congestion. "

This objective is that of the algorithm, which is materialized in the form of a very simple equation. From there, it was enough to build an efficient machine learning system that allows to analyze the traffic in a time t, to add the additional traffic load that could affect the network at any moment and then to calculate the probability Of a break at each of the nodes of the network (or intersections). Add to this a hint of linear algebra and you get an ideal route calculation system.

Guo and co. have succeeded in developing the mathematical optimization tools that allow this kind of real-time calculation. They were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of their algorithm in simulations, and are currently working on improving their BMW partnership system, which provides them with a large database of its shared fleet of Munich.

This technology could be implemented very quickly. In addition, it is enough to optimize the itinerary of 10% of the vehicles of the network to fluidify the traffic, which means that most motorists will be able to continue to drive like branches, in all serenity. Great, is not it?

Source: Motherboard, by Micheal Byrne, March 28th, 2017

December 28, 2016

Cubic Transportation Systems has is predicting that the new year will bring an integrated approach to smart ticketing, integrated personal mobility and further advances in autonomous vehicles.

Writing for Smart Highways, the company says the three issues will move on significantly over the next twelve months.

Its predictions in full are:

Single approach to smart ticketing  

A single integrated and easily accessible ticketing system covering multiple regions and modes of travel is central to the idea of smart travel. A single travel account will help enable economic growth, especially in North England, and should be available to the whole of the UK, not just accessed by London’s city-dwellers.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling will make the initiative a priority for his tenure, rolling it out within the next two years. Speaking at the North of England Transport Summit last week, he said, “Passengers should not have to carry a Manchester card, a Leeds card and a different one for each city and for longer journeys, bar codes on mobile phones should be available. The whole transport sector should move very rapidly towards this.”

Improved transport services will encourage greater inter-modality across cities through a compelling customer proposition. In turn, this will boost the Northern England economy, improve network optimisation and lead to reduced congestion on the surrounding highways.

Northern England is taking all the right steps in making integrated ticketing a reality, through its Smart North initiative. Once implemented, the scheme will bring Northern England benefits comparable to what the Ventra card, Oyster card and contactless payment have brought commuters and transport service operators in other major cities around the world, such as Chicago and London.

Autonomous vehicles

We are not far off from seeing futuristic transport concepts, such as driverless cars, become a reality in the UK. We are already seeing adoption of this technology in its infancy helped by large funding projects, such as Innovate UK’s ambition for full automation on our roads, and Chancellor Philip Hammond’s allocation of £390 million in the most recent Autumn Statement to bolster the development of low emission and autonomous vehicles.

However, the adoption rate of innovation doesn’t necessary just depend on the technological possibilities, but also the social implications. The technology must ensure that all passengers have paid via a valid contactless payment method on the autonomous bus – is it safe to remove bus drivers who enforce revenue protection and a certain level of safety to passengers? Would we be conformable reducing the level of child supervision? This social dynamic creates new challenges which need to be looked at and considered thoroughly.

To fully understand what the future of transport will look like, we need to look far beyond vehicle technology.

Integrated personal mobility

Smart devices will soon become the central organisational tool for all trip planning and mobility personalisation. All modes of transport will be integrated, as mobility services become mobility providers, enabling seamless, on-demand journeys. Timetables and choice of transport mode will become a thing of the past as travellers will only need to know what time to leave and when they’ll reach their destination.

This will require open use of personal data, which will transform mass transit networks despite wider concerns. An open data system, where commuters use a single travel account for all travel transactions and information – whether that’s public transport, walking, using the bike, using Uber, and so on – would give the city unprecedented insight into how people commute and what’s behind their travel choices.

However, many cities face a major challenge – growing populations are placing pressure on current infrastructure systems, leading to congestion and inefficiency. The key to engaging the public with this is the condition that data is used responsibly and for the greater good. This anonymous data is given to third-party app developers who can then use it to release innovative apps that revolutionise the way we approach travelling.

Collaboration and integration of mobility providers, technology and data investments, and an open ecosystem for sharing real-time journey data are just a few of the necessary changes the transport industry will need to make. The future of people movement is on the verge of evolving beyond anything we have ever known before.

source: http://smarthighways.net/cubic-makes-its-transport-predictions-for-2017/

Smart Cities between Datapolis and Participolis

When it comes to the near future of Humans on Earth, the future that our children will experience - and this is the subject of this essay - literature is obviously speculative and readily theoretical. Francis Pisani avoids this double trap with ease, which is what makes his work quite fascinating. How is it ? These intelligent cities in which several billion people will live one day, he saw the first, embryonic or already formed, in China, India, Asia, Latin America and Europe. As a journalist, he investigated on the spot, questioned the actors as witnesses, prioritized his information and cross-checked his sources, which he did not fail to mention. As a writer, he gathered the pieces of his puzzle and made it appear intelligence. The result is the description, in simple words and in a fluid logic, of what we are going to do - to manage the urban space in which we are going to live.

Read More:

http://data.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/73/87/12/20150402/ob_955cef_ob-094dfc-pisani-voyagedanslesvillesin.pdf

Francis Pisani is a journalist.

This essay was published in March 2015 by l'Observatoire Netexplo.

Keolis Rennes has launched an experiment to facilitate the mobility of disabled persons by connected sensors. An innovation that is part of Keolis's desire to use the full potential of the Internet of Objects to enrich the customer experience and strengthen the Group's operational performance.

A Keolis innovation to find a parking space reserved for disabled persons in real time

Since July 2016, two car parks of the city of Rennes, one outdoor, the other underground, are equipped with sensors of car detection installed in places reserved for people with reduced mobility (PMR).
Thanks to a Sigfox low-speed network, the information coming from the sensors is broadcast to the open data portal of Keolis Rennes, which processes all the data of the STAR network, the public transport network of Rennes Métropole operated by Keolis.
The data on available "PMR" places are then integrated and accessible to motorists in real time on the various mobile applications powered by the data portal. This data is also accessible on the application of the supplier of objects detecting the presence of cars.
To develop this solution, Keolis Rennes and Keolis, have teamed up with the start-ups Parkisseo which provides the sensors and Intesens, supplier of the connectivity solution.

Keolis connects to the Internet of Objects

For Keolis, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the coming years represents an opportunity to create new uses in public transit. In addition to direct interaction with customers through their watches and other connected wristbands, the IoT is a powerful lever for enhancing the operational performance of its networks and enhancing passenger satisfaction. In this context, the Group and its experts in innovation launched a project dedicated to industrial Internet (declination of IoT to the industrial field).

Many ways of applying industrial IoT to public transport

Low-cost and simple to deploy within networks and on rolling stock, sensors connected to low-speed networks can collect a wide variety of data: moisture, vibration, fluid leakage, electrical or magnetic measurements, voltage, temperature , Acceleration or inclination, luminosity ... All these measures make it possible to optimize operations and maintenance activities at lower cost, for example:

- Control of energy consumption
- Optimization of vehicle parking in depots
- Control of the water consumption of the washing stations and monitoring of the washing of buses or trams
- Vibration detection to anticipate heavy maintenance operations that can impact the network

Some figures:

• 20.8 Billion connected objects worldwide (According to the US consulting firm GARTNER)
• 2 Billion connected objects sold in France by 2020 according to the GFK Institute

source: keolis.com December 2016

Ebène Cybercity is Mauritius’s hi-tech hub, and home to Africa’s internet registry platform. Photograph: Christopher Schuetze for the Guardian

As the fruit bat flies, it’s only 300 metres from Cyber Tower 1 to the massive food court and commercial centre that was built to service Ebène Cybercity – the hi-tech office community on the outskirts of Mauritius’s capital, Port Louis.

But walking from the ostentatious lobby of Cyber Tower 1 to the shops and restaurants can take 20 minutes – if you don’t get lost along the way. The fastest route by foot bisects car parks, traverses overgrown vacant lots, and stumbles over temporary walkways past some of the biggest businesses on the island.

Both an urban planning disaster and – for many proud Mauritians – the very definition of modern office life, Cybercity was first proposed by the government in 2001 as a high-tech hub, and now houses almost 25,000 mostly educated, middle-class workers during the week. While the development can be criticised for a shocking lack cohesiveness, poor public transport, limited parking or even difficult access by foot, its creation did bring many aspects of modern connected life to Mauritian workers.

Though not officially part of Cybercity, the headquarters of the Mauritian Commercial Bank took its inspiration from the planned community

“In Europe when we talk about smart cities, we think of revitalisation of existing cities,” says Bertrand Moingeon, a professor at HEC in Paris who studies urban development in Mauritius. “But in many places in Africa, including Mauritius, so-called smart city developments actually do the opposite: they create exclusive urban cities far away from the dust, chaos and inequality of the existing cityscape,” Moingeon explains. “It goes against social inclusiveness.”Rashiq Fataar, an urbanist based in South Africa, agrees that many smart-city projects on the continent are based on the desire to start with a fresh slate. “The whole goal is to plan from scratch. Especially for the private sector, it’s all about planning and controlling.”

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/23/story-cities-48-ebene-cybercity-mauritius-vision-africa-smart-future

The city of Moscow has been awarded the 2016 Transport Achievement Award for what the judges say is its “exemplary approach” to improving traffic conditions in the Russian capital.

The prize, awarded by the International Transport Forum (ITF), is in recognition of a series of initiatives to reduce congestion following 20 years of almost uncontrolled development of urban traffic.

Over the past five years Moscow has introduced a “rigorous and comprehensive” set of policies to address the gridlock on its streets, reducing the number of cars in central Moscow by 25% and increasing the average speed of traffic by 12%, despite 600 new cars being registered in the area each day.

In 2013, Moscow traffic was ranked as worst in the world by the TomTom Traffic Index.  In the 2016 edition it has improved to fifth place in that index.

The ITF jury recognized the “impressive achievement in improving overall traffic in Moscow.”  In particular, the jurors highlighted “the effectiveness of coherent, coordinated initiatives and policy actions that facilitated this remarkable change.”

Measures put into place in Moscow include:

• Paid car parking: Paid parking was introduced in 2012 and since then has systematically expanded to areas with high car traffic.  Within the framework of a policy designed to build civilized parking space, more than 67 000 paid parking spaces have been introduced since 2012, including 7 000 parking places for disabled people.  Parking violations in Moscow fell by 65%.  Paid parking has generated €90 million in revenues over that period.  These funds are used to improve the neighborhoods where fees are collected; residents decide how to allocate funds.
• Development of public transport: Moscow’s city transport handles over 15 million passenger journeys per day.  Since 2010, 34 kilometres of subway track were added, 18 new metro stations built and about 1 500 new subway cars purchased.  Over the same period, the capital city’s fleet has been updated significantly.  More than 5 000 new buses, 538 trolleybuses and 150 trams were added to service the routes.  The route network has been optimised.  More than 100 new routes have been created for surface transport, 230 kilometres of bus lanes built, more than 5,000 stops renovated and 552 electronic information boards installed.  98% of the transit fleet servicing the routes is wheelchair-accessible.
• Innovative ticketing: More than 50% of trips in Moscow use electronic travel cards called “Troika”, introduced in 2013, which has reduced queues at ticket windows by one third, drastically cut the number of ticket purchases from surface transport drivers, and saved around €15 million on the production of paper tickets.  To stimulate the use of long-term passes, prices have been lowered for unlimited ride passes.  An intermodal 90-minute ticket makes transfers easier, cheaper and more popular.
• Governance reform in public transport: Contracts for above-ground transport are now awarded through open competitive tenders.  Bidders must guarantee standards set by the Moscow city government, including comfortable buses, payment via city transit passes, unified schedules, and provide free transit for eligible passengers.  Contracts for 211 city routes have been awarded to commercial operators, with operations scheduled to start in mid-2016.
• Development of cycling: In 2015, 880,000 bike trips were made using the city’s shared bicycles, an eightfold increase over the previous year.  2,600 bicycles are available to city dwellers at 300 automatic bike stations.  From 2011 to 2015, the total length of bike paths increased nearly hundredfold, from 2.3 kilometers to 216 kilometers.  Legislation was changed to allow cyclists to use bus lanes and to take bicycles on surface transport for free.  In 2016, by way of experiment, a sharing system of electric bicycles will be launched.
• Car sharing and taxi reform: Moscow’s first short-term car sharing system started operations in 2015.  Today, it has a pool of 550 cars and more than 70,000 registered users who have taken over 220,000 trips since its inception.  Taxis account for 260,000 daily rides in Moscow.  Problems with unregulated cab services, including the use of potentially unsafe cabs, have been addressed through the issue of more than 60,000 official permits to cab drivers.
• Environmental requirements for cargo vehicles: To improve the environmental situation and to reduce polluting emissions into the air, restrictions were imposed on truck transits through the city in 2013.  Only trucks conforming to the emission standard Euro-3 or higher are allowed to enter Moscow’s downtown.  More than 900 road cameras monitor truck traffic on a daily basis.  These controls and other regulatory measures had helped reduce the air pollution level by 11% by 2015.

“For many years, Muscovites believed that traffic jams were simply the price to pay for living in a big city. This has changed”, said Sergey Sobyanin, Mayor of Moscow.  “Our achievements in fighting the traffic gridlock have been made possible by the efforts of an effective team of professionals who believe in the power to make substantive changes. This important international award encourages us to continue this work.”

Big Data has not finished surprising us, and come to revolutionize the economy by transforming the approach to whole sectors. The flow analysis of massive data in real time, to make concrete decisions, is a major challenge for the cities of tomorrow. According to Philippe Torres, board director and digital strategy at L'Atelier BNP Paribas, and co-author of the study "Big Data, Big Economy", the biggest potential to use the power of Big Data is also in the field Smart City. Will the data to make our cities smarter? Yes, and the transformation has already begun.

The Smart City is a reality

Less pollution, waste management optimized, more parking problems and even an optimized energy management as necessary ... The fantasy of intelligent city is not new. The concept of "smart cities" dragging on for years, even decades, with the sweet dream that the city of tomorrow will improve our lives. For now, the experiments about smart cities remained limited to sporadic trials. But the emergence of the power of Big Data, and connected objects, upsets this finding.

Bluffing examples of what technology offers is now visible. These include the city of Songdo, about 60 km from Seoul, South Korea. Cisco has launched projects related to the concept of smart city since 2000. The prehistory in data!
◾RFID chips can track the real-time traffic, and every person to know the live traffic conditions;
◾Waste is collected directly from the residents, as required. More trucks to collect garbage;
◾Connected bracelets can detect abnormalities such as missing children on the way to school;
◾Public lighting is done in real time, depending on occupancy.

How Big Data can make our cities smarter?

The example of Songdo, but also other initiatives, gives ideas to major cities around the world. "What is interesting in this application is that the people themselves become a channel of information feedback that will help cities to further optimize their services," says Philippe Torres in the columns of the Digital Factory. How Big Data acts concretely?
◾It can help reduce emissions and drastically limit pollution. An intelligent traffic management can be implemented using sensors in roads to decongest areas and better balance the traffic flows. We limit unnecessary travel and promotes "soft" travel;
◾It can provide an answer to the eternal problem of parking. Again, with sensors, a car will soon be guided to a parking "free", the exact location will be sent for example by GPS;
◾It can make a real reduction in energy requirements. As such, the development of smart grids (intelligent network electrics) is a good example. Optimize production, distribution, consumption, it becomes possible with the data users;
◾It can respond to management issues. The density and compactness are not the only answers to the cities of tomorrow. Depending on the required functional diversity, architectural choices can be made in an informed manner.

Source: Rémi Vidal, May 17th, 2016 - Alphalyr Blog

Niti Aayog decided to come out with mobility planning tool kits to facilitate smart and sustainable urban transport solutions.

New Delhi: With the Indian urban population expected to reach 600 million by 2030, the government’s think tank Niti Aayog has decided to come out with mobility planning tool kits to facilitate smart and sustainable urban transport solutions.

The planning and project design and implementation tool kits developed with the help of experts, state governments and local urban body authorities would focus on small (1 to 10 lakh inhabitants) and medium (10 to 50 lakh inhabitants) sized cities. They would promote developing public transportation like city bus services and bus road transit (BRT). Besides, they would also make urban areas complete streets with provisions for people can walk, cycle and park.

The decision was taken in March when during Niti Aayog’s consultation with states and urban local bodies, it was revealed that they lacked sufficient institutional and individual capacities to implement such solutions.

Advisor Sunit Sanghi and director Jeetendra Singh of Managing Urbanisation Verticals in Niti Aayog said urban transport systems should facilitate more of walking, cycling and travel by public transport rather than personal motor vehicle. Some work has been done in this regard but it is quite fragmented and there is a need to develop simple, clear and lucid framework documents and holistic guidelines for cities, particularly the smaller and medium sized ones. It will help them to plan, implement, maintain and operate smart and sustainable urban transport solutions.

In urban areas, efficient and affordable mobility is important to ensure easy access for citizens to labour markets and places of education and leisure. Lack of proper mobility can make cities non-inclusive as the poor and vulnerable sections would not be able to access the labour markets.

Sanghi and Singh, in their Niti Aayog blog, said that the augmentation in infrastructure of roads and flyovers and more parking space in cities has led to increase in the ownership of cars and motorbikes. As a result, Indian cities were witnessing more and more congestion on streets, leading to air and noise pollution and posing serious health hazards for citizens. In cities like Bengaluru, the situation has reached such alarming levels that citizens are spending over 3-4 hours a day commuting between home and work. The situation in Delhi is similar. Delhi tried to address this problem temporarily to some extent recently by going for the odd-even formula for a fortnight.

At Yerres (Essonne), a test radar was installed at a stop sign. It has a camera capable of measuring whether motorists burn the panel.

Sécurité routière : un radar au stop expérimenté

He recorded 500 offenses in half a day. A new radar was installed at a stop in the city of Yerres (Essonne). It measures if motorists mark well off the panel. An idea that is already cringe. "I'm tired of seeing cameras everywhere. It's outrageous," protested a conductive micro France 2.

Speed cameras at red lights already installed

The radar is equipped with a camera and an automatic reading system of number plates. Once the infringement found, the video is sent to the municipal police of the city, which will verbalize the driver at fault. This risk 135 euro fine and a deduction of four points if he gate a stop. The automobile associations denounce a "pump money". The family of radars is growing: Radar on red lights, and soon even mobile speed cameras on the lights and fake cameras to deter motorists to drive faster.

Source: France TV Info, Feb 19, 2016