On the Way to Intelligent Traffic Control

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

For Thomas Alexander Sick Nielsen, transport researcher at DTU, the CITS project was a welcome opportunity to get a better insight into some of the road user types that we lack knowledge about.

Cars are currently counted in several places where, e.g., coils are installed in the road to register passing vehicles. But automatic counts are used in particular for cars, while soft traffic is counted less frequently. And this gives some uncertainty in the overall picture of traffic in Copenhagen.                     

The lines are generated by the road users’ smartphones and consist of the same data as in the picture above, but before sorting by direction, speed, and road user type.

“Bicycles are counted manually, and the same applies to the few places where you count pedestrians. By registering Wi-Fi units, we place cyclists and pedestrians on equal footing with other road users. Today, for example, it’s a problem that we don’t know how many pedestrians there are, and whether there are places people avoid because they feel insecure there. Here, you can use the level of detail and even register per minute. For road users, we also have very little knowledge of what is happening at night. And we have no ‘fluid’ data showing at short intervals how traffic builds up and breaks down,” says Thomas Alexander Sick Nielsen.

For Professor Per Høeg from DTU Space, the CITS project was a very successful proof of concept experiment providing the researchers with more information than previously seen in similar systems.

The project showed that Wi-Fi data can be collected and used to show the number of road users and their movement patterns.

“We have also attracted great interest from several cities in Europe and the USA. And, of course, also from the City of Copenhagen which uses CITS as background material in other projects,” he says.

This is confirmed by Søren Kvist from Copenhagen Solutions Lab. The testing of different technologies to create a smart transport system is now being tendered out:

“We are currently creating a more permanent test area around H.C. Andersens Boulevard where we test other sensor types, parking sensors, pollution sensors, and Wi-Fi for tourists—based on the smart city concept Copenhagen Connecting, which received the award as the best in the world in Barcelona in 2014. If we develop systems with precise data about traffic, we can optimize traffic by 11 – 32 per cent. The reason for this large span is that there are still many uncertainties associated with it. But the potential is enormous, if we can control the traffic intelligently,” he say

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