Upgrading Koblenz's traffic information system

David Crawford reviews an award-winning scheme that delivered a 30% increase in website usage – below budget

The German Federal Agricul­tural Show (Bundesgarten­schau, BUGA) runs between  mid-April and mid-October every other year in a differ­ent city. The most recent, 2011, edition took place in Koblenz, a medium-sized community with a population of just over 105,000 in the Rheinland-Pfalz region, and was expected to draw an additional 40,000 visitors a day to its central area.

Traffic access from the motorway links to Koblenz can be problematic, even under normal conditions, owing to the topography of the city, which lies at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, with limited capacity on the connecting bridges. Coin­ciding events such as the August Rhein-in-Flammen (Rhine in Flames) firework display were going to accentuate the problem.

The chosen solution was to adapt the ex­isting intermodal traffic information system (TIS) platform of the regional Rheinland-Pfalz Road Authority (LBM) to enable it to deliver consistent guidance extending over the urban area of Koblenz for the benefit of the additional visitors arriving by motorway.

First steps KOBLENZ TRAFFIC INFORMATION SYSTEM UPGRADE

Cost:
• €126,000 ($171,950)

Benefits:
• 37% saving on budget
• 30% rise in travel website usage

Project budget:
• €200,000 ($272,000)

Expenditure:
• New webcams €62,000 ($84,610)
• Data purchase and processing €39,000 ($53,223)
• Internal staff costs €25,000 ($34,117)
• Total €126,000 ($171,950)

The first step was to expand the scope of the LBM’s existing mobility web portal (%$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 oLinkExternal www.verkehr.rlp www.verkehr.rlp false http://www.verkehr.rlp/ false false%>), developed for monitor­ing motorway conditions, to include both the city’s urban roads and the key connect­ing links between the two networks.

Achieving this depended on the avail­ability of comprehensive information on urban traffic conditions to enable the opera­tion of strategically-located variable message signs and the inclusion of camera views of critical sections. The latter were intended for use both by the travelling public and in traf­fic control operations, as valuable feedback and ‘ground truth’ sources.

The resulting data would be added as a dedicated ‘BUGA’ layer to the portal.

(Public transport information came through an open web map service operated by the Koblenz Public Transport Association).

To gain the wider traffic condition in­formation, the city decided as a first step to buy from German supplier 7201 Mobotix 14 new cameras to add to its existing array of four, with the benefit of the LBM’s advice on their location and installation.
But this was not going to be enough to ensure the comprehensive coverage needed.

There was, in any case, a tightly-restricted project budget of €200,000 (US$272,000), of which the new cameras alone accounted for €62,000 (US$84,610). This ruled out a conventional solution involving a road-based monitoring sys­tem across the central area of Koblenz.

To fill the gap, the city contracted with US-headquartered private-sector traffic in­formation provider 163 Inrix to purchase, from its floating vehicle data (FVD)-based Real Time Traffic Flow system, output on meas­ured travel times and speeds on all the major urban roads and relevant regional arterials.

(The necessary location coding for this had already been carried out in 2009 and cov­ered the area adequately, with the exception of one access road to a coach parking area).

Inrix partner company TraffGo Road, a spin-off from the Physics of Transport and Traffic group of the University of Duisburg, then carried out the technical integration for the LBM to enable the transfer of the result­ing output into a map image.

Since the com­pany already operated the mobility platform, there was no need for any further investment in the presentation of the Inrix data.

TraffGo Road also integrated data from the new traffic cameras and public transport information from the Koblenz PTA. This was the first example in the region of the public sector processing privately-sourced traffic data. The LBM’s Helga Rottenau told ITS International: “The project has raised interest in other German cities and similar projects have taken up elements of the approach. The concept of public authority purchasing of dynamic data from private content providers has recently been gaining in importance”.

It was a deliberate decision to offer driv­ers no routing guidance, since this could have come into conflict with advice being given by in-vehicle navigation systems or other sources. Instead, the approach was that drivers had ready access to an inte­grated, map-based format from which they could draw their own conclusions.
Project results

The project came in well under the budget and achieved a 30% increase in usage of the %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 oLinkExternal www.verkehr.rlp www.verkehr.rlp false http://www.verkehr.rlp/ false false%>.website during the BUGA period.

Reviewing it, the LBM’s Guido Schuster says: “Our traffic control centre, and that of the regional police, continuously observed the generated and disseminated level of service and webcam images and both have confirmed the high quality of the pro­cessed data”.

On transferability, he comments: “The buying-in of data is a concept that suits several business cases. It is faster than the planning for, and procurement, installation and testing of, new equipment; costs are lower over a short period; there is no maintenance requirement and no disrup­tion caused by roadworks that could affect other events; and the data can also be used for additional purposes by a local admin­istration, e.g. for calibrating traffic control applications”.

Following its success at BUGA – and despite earlier plans to mothball it in April 2012 – the major part of the service remains operational within the framework of a larger contract with the content provider. Only the coverage of the secondary urban roads has been reduced.

The project won the small-scale de­ployment category of the 2012 7202 EasyWay Awards announced at the concluding EasyWay 2 Forum in London in December.
 
In other deployments, the LBM is cur­rently using Inrix real-time data to display traffic state information for parts of its mo­torway and national roads network, which are not covered by stationary sensors.

The German region of Bavaria started to supplement its traffic information platform (%$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 oLinkExternal www.bayerninfo.de www.bayerninfo.de false http://www.bayerninfo.de/ false false%>) with In­rix real-time data in October 2012, to compensate for missing sensor on some motorways resulting roadworks.

The BUGA layer, using Inrix FV data, delivered content covering:

• Traffic situations
• Traffic messages
• Locations of construction sites in the city of Koblenz
• Locations of BUGA-dedicated park and ride sites
• Traffic webcam images from the LBM and Koblenz
• Locations of stations with link to current timetables
• Locations of bus stops with links to current timetables
• The layout of the BUGA site

EASYWAY PROGRAMME

The EC-supported EasyWay programme is an EU-wide, cross-border traffic management initiative set up to encourage ITS deployment on the major trans-European highways with the aim of reducing congestion, accidents and environmental impacts.

The only transport-sector platform to bring together the great majority of EU member states, it has now produced a set of common guidelines for ITS deployment to enable greater national and regional cooperation and interoperability.

It is also planning a future phase focusing on traffic management on longdistance road corridors.