Better coordination to fix traffic
To improve Bangkok's notorious traffic, the Office of Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning together with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) plans to roll out the national framework for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS).
ITS is expected to provide an effective means to solve serious traffic problems. It should improve the safety, efficiency, and comfort of transport through the use of advanced communication and information processing technologies. The resulting smoother traffic flow will contribute significantly to a reduction in air pollution. Even though ITS is a matter that many agencies and organisations have been concerned with for a long time, the answer is to consolidate the separate systems and enhance them for increased benefit. That is why a national framework is required. The framework is being developed by the Thai ITS Forum. The working group will develop the ITS road map and send the proposal to the government for consideration as a national ITS strategy in the future, said Passakorn Prathombutr, director of the Programme for Next Generation Internet at Nectec. Two government organisations, Nectec and OTP, are acting as leaders of the ITS Forum that embraces Thai Embedded Systems Association (Tesa), universities, and private sector interests. The forum was established late last year. The move is not only to improve the traffic problem in Bangkok, but also to stop the repetition of various traffic strategies that are being developed separately by many government agencies. The ITS road map is aimed at integrating the existing ITS systems from many agencies and developing essential new projects. The forum proposed three main priority areas for the ITS framework. These include vision and architecture, data centres, and ITS devices. Each area will be taken care of by the working groups under the forum. The vision and architecture working group will oversee all data and information related to ITS, for example, digital map data. The data centre working group will work on ITS related data formats and data exchange standard issues. The ITS devices working group will study development of ITS devices and research on how to apply ITS in wider applications for the masses with greater benefit. However, OTP itself has already developed its own road map for ITS development for the next 10 years. The result from the working groups of the ITS forum will be combined with the OTP's ITS roadmap. "The problem isn't that we don't have ITS systems, it's because we have separate ITS systems which do not co-exist and are not integrated," said a forum member. asina@nationgroup.com Asina Pornwasin The Nation
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