UK city deploys wireless sensors to reduce congestion

In a bid to cut congestion, Portsmouth City Council in the UK has installed a wireless vehicle tracking solution in the city. The system, from Danish wireless technology company Blip Systems, was deployed by the company’s UK partner Smart CCTV which has installed BlipTrack sensors on the three most-often congested roads linking to the M27/A27 east-west corridor.
November 19, 2013 Read time: 2 mins
In a bid to cut congestion, Portsmouth City Council in the UK has installed a wireless vehicle tracking solution in the city.

The system, from Danish wireless technology company 3778 Blip Systems, was deployed by the company’s UK partner smart CCTV which has installed BlipTrack sensors on the three most-often congested roads linking to the M27/A27 east-west corridor.

The sensors use data received from Bluetooth-enables devices in passing vehicles to measure journey times and speeds, enabling the council to provide queue warnings on VMS displays and mobile apps.   It also provides the city with valuable information about traffic flow for planning and optimising traffic.

According to Smart CCTV’s Managing Director Nick Hewitson, the installation of the BlipTrack sensors costs about one-tenth of the cost of an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system.  He said at a recent 288 ITS UK conference, “BlipTrack catches upwards of 40 per cent of vehicles, compared to with 95 per cent with ANPR, but this is statistically more than adequate for journey time information”.
Detection, Monitoring & Machine Vision

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Smart Spanish city trials cell-based traffic management
    November 7, 2013
    David Crawford reports on an urban electronic nervous system. The northern Spanish city of Santander – historically a port - is now an emerging technology showcase attracting global attention as a prototype for a medium-sized smart city of the future. In a move to determine the optimal use of available data, it is creating a de-facto experimental laboratory for sensor and mobile phone-based urban traffic management and environmental monitoring innovations.
    Read More
  • Middle East first for Navteq
    March 2, 2012
    Navteq has announced the launch of Navteq Traffic in the United Arab Emirates, the first traffic launch for the company in the Middle East. According to recent company research, traffic information is the most sought after navigation-related feature on GPS navigation devices with 96 per cent of wireless navigation users saying they want the feature and 89 per cent of those with in-car navigation citing a desire for real-time traffic in UAE.
    Read More
  • San Diego to spend US$163 million to beat congestion
    August 26, 2015
    Aiming to fight worsening traffic congestion on San Diego’s roads, city officials have created a US$163 million master plan to install modern stoplight timing systems and other advanced technologies that combat gridlock, says the San Diego Union-Tribune. The master plan, the first of its kind in city history, comes as many neighbourhoods are bracing for more dense developments to absorb the region’s growing population. In addition, recent analysis by the San Diego Association of Governments shows that
    Read More
  • Plate matching technology more accurate than conventional OCR
    February 3, 2012
    EngiNe srl's patented Plate Matching technique is something of a paradox, in that it achieves formal vehicle identification without recognising, in the accepted sense, the characters on its number plate. Here, Angelo Dionisi of ENG Group explains how it works
    Read More

Highlighted Content