Beijing uses latest technologies to streamline the city's traffic

Creation date: 17 October 2009

HI-TECH CONTROL: Beijing's Traffic Management Bureau Command Center has been monitoring and directing Beijing's road traffic since it started operating in April 2007.
The National Day parade marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China happened on Beijing's central Tiananmen Square on October 1. The event drew an audience of more than 200,000 people and nearly 200,000 participants, who all needed to be dispersed within three and a half hours after the ceremony. The event posed an unprecedented challenge to the city's traffic control system.

But a newly adopted intelligent transportation system (ITS), which uses information and communications technologies to manage infrastructure and vehicles, helped the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau complete its daunting mission.

The bureau mobilized 7,000 traffic police officers and 6,000 traffic coordinators to work throughout the city that day, all of whom were equipped with global positioning system receivers, said Sui Yagang, vice director of the bureau. The tool enabled data and video communications between the bureau's command center and parade organizers.
The command center, put into operation on April 28, 2007, possesses the largest and most advanced ITS in the world. It is equipped with 22 live monitoring systems that provide traffic videos and information on signals and the flow of vehicles. The system, which covers the whole city and operates around the clock, also monitors accidents and immediately reports them to the police.

The parade and colorfully decorated Tiananmen Square made Beijing a popular tourist destination during the one-week National Day holiday. The city received 14.97 million visitors during the holiday, up 59 percent year on year, according to statistics from the Beijing Tourism Administration.

To cope with the surge of pedestrians and vehicles during the holiday, all of the 277 information screens along Beijing's vehicular arteries that carry real-time traffic information were activated so that drivers could try to avoid congested streets. Traffic cameras operated at full capacity to catch all traffic violations.

Beijing is home to 3.85 million vehicles and sees around 1,500 new ones every day. With such a growth rate and with the city's population reaching 16 million, it will not be long before the capital sees 4 million vehicles on its streets. Li Xiaosong, a Beijing Municipal Committee of Transport spokeswoman, said that Beijing's traffic infrastructure has been able to sustain the city's normal operation and that economic and social development can be partly attributed to the use of the new technologies.

"The city has more than 20,000 buses, probably the largest municipal bus fleet in the world. They are all efficiently coordinated by an intelligent bus assignment system," she said.

Complete control

Several kinds of ITS information are being transmitted to the command center of the city's traffic management bureau, the system's brain.

"We have a digital map with different colors symbolizing different traffic situations, with red representing congestion and yellow marking locations of slow traffic. The on-road monitoring system updates the map every two minutes," said Zhang Chenjun, vice director of the command center, who was standing in front of the huge screen that displayed the map.

The screen, which covers one wall of the two-floor center and is comprised of 98×80-inch displays, shows real-time information that is collected by more than 10,000 ultrasound and microwave devices installed on major roads throughout the city. The map shows not only traffic congestion, but also the location of each traffic police officer and all police vehicles on duty.
The map monitors all of Beijing's major roads around the clock and sends an alarm when there is a traffic accident. The ITS can accurately locate traffic slowdowns and accidents so that the nearest police can respond immediately.

New road signs at intersections that are connected to the ITS tell drivers the traffic situation in all four directions. People can also obtain live traffic information by watching TV or going online.

Traffic lights are also getting "smart" and can change based on information collected by traffic flow sensors installed at road intersections. The automatic color changing can maximize road traffic efficiency and alleviate congestion.

To speed up public transport, traffic lights on roads with several bus lines have been fitted with programs that give priority to mass transit. When buses pass through intersections, they are identified by radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers installed near the traffic lights. The reader detects RFID tags aboard buses and sends signals to the traffic light, which changes to green to allow enough time for the bus to pass.

Some traffic lights at areas around the city center have been upgraded to indicate the time remaining until traffic lights change and also broadcast voice reminders to alert the blind.
"Our system now covers more than 80 percent of Beijing's roads," said Wu Xianli, a police officer working at the traffic management bureau's command center.

To alleviate Beijing's traffic congestion, which almost turned streets into parking lots during rush hour, the city implemented "odd-even" traffic restrictions on vehicles before the 2008 Olympics. The restrictions banned vehicles on alternate days depending on their license plate numbers. The policy proved effective in easing the city's congestion and reducing pollution and has since become a regular restriction. ITS cameras are capable of photographing violators of the ban.

Also during the Beijing Olympics, the city operated 35 temporary bus lines to sporting venues, putting more than 3,500 buses on the road. They were all directed by a public transport distribution system jointly developed by Beijing Public Transport Holdings Ltd., Beijing Jiaotong University and Digital China Holdings Ltd. The system proved successful at optimizing bus routes and calculating how many buses were needed for each route to transport expected spectators, including 100,000 people during the opening ceremony.
In 2009, Beijing residents for the first time began choosing public transport over private cars for their daily commutes, said a report from the Ministry of Transport's Transportation Information Center.

Navigating subways faster

From January 2007 to June 2009, the intervals between trains on Beijing's subway system were shortened 15 times. The city's Line 2, one of its busiest, achieved a minimum interval of two minutes, which would be unattainable without its electronic ticketing system.

The subway's ticketing system went completely electronic in May 2008, replacing paper tickets with magnetic stripe cards and smart cards. The upgrade has provided riders with an added level of convenience by eliminating the need to constantly purchase new tickets.

Another benefit of the new system is the ability to gather information based on when and where the cards are scanned. Under the automatic fare collection system, which includes more than 5,000 ticket-vending machines and ticket checkers throughout Beijing's 96 subway stations, passengers present their cards when entering and exiting the subway system. The process generates valuable data that can help the subway system to evaluate train schedules.

Source: http://www.bjreview.com.cn/science/txt/2009-10/17/content_224365.htm