Technology to help poorly designed city

Bangkok was declared the best city in the world in 2008 by Travel and Leisure magazine. But Thailand's capital city is also notorious for some of the world's worst traffic problems.

Every day, traffic jams cost the country dearly in terms of lost time, wasted energy and atmospheric pollution.

For decades, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) has shouldered the massive task of trying the cure the city's traffic problems. The director-general of the BMA's Traffic and Transportation Department, Jumpol Sumpaopol, has devoted himself to the challenge of the city's streets for many years.

Behind the scenes, the BMA has been continuously implementing information and communications technology (ICT) to help improve the traffic situation. But there is a basic problem: the city's tangle of streets occupies only 4 per cent of its total area of 1,500 square kilometres. Other comparable big cities have streets that cover, on average, 18 per cent of their overall area.

That is why the mission to improve Bangkok's traffic problem is "so very challenging", Jumpol said. The BMA cannot increase the number of streets from 4 per cent of the city's area to 18 per cent.

"To increase the street area by only 1 per cent, it would mean creating around 2,000 kilometres of streets, and we don't have such areas for streets," Jumpol said.

Meanwhile, the tell-tale statistics grow worse every year: Bangkok's population of about 10 million and the number of vehicles in the capital - about 4.5 million, or nearly one vehicle for every two people - are growing rapidly.

The only solution for the BMA is to use the city's existing streets, but to bring in high technology to help manage the flow of traffic - especially during rush hours.

The city administration is planning to implement a project called the Area Traffic Control (ATC) system, to improve traffic management and to give traffic information to commuters via many channels, including the Internet and mobile phones.

The project involves an ATC centre and many field units, comprising computer-control boxes, traffic lights, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) and image-processing cameras at each of Bangkok's 497 intersections.

"There are four types of cameras in which that BMA will invest Bt3 billion over the next three years," Jumpol said. "These are cameras for traffic management -CCTV and image-processing cameras; for law enforcement, including red-light cameras; for traffic information reports - remote pan and zoom cameras; and for security surveillance. By 2012, we will have spent Bt3 billion to install a total of 20,000 cameras across the city."

The ATC Centre will be the operational hub for the entire transport system. From this point, the system will control and adjust traffic lights automatically at intersections according to real-time conditions of vehicle density, obtained from image-processing cameras working as vehicle detectors. The vehicle density at each intersection will be calculated by the computer system so that traffic lights can be controlled for optimum efficiency.

Traffic signals will be constantly monitored and the light phases at each intersection will be automatically adjusted by the computer system to aid the flow of traffic. The benefits will be reduced travelling time and fuel use, as well as less air and noise pollution.

Computer-control boxes are currently working as small Area Traffic Control centres, each overseeing traffic control in an area covering 10 intersections. The boxes are linked to all traffic lights within the 10-intersection area, as well as to CCTV and image-processing cameras in the area. The computer receives real-time traffic information in image format from the image-processing cameras so it can calculate and analyse information with which to manage the traffic flow by controlling the traffic lights.

"Currently, the ATC system in Bangkok is working separately in each of the computer-control-box areas. Our plan is to develop the whole ATC system, to control the entire traffic area of Bangkok with an automated system, by integrating and pooling information from all of the city's 497 intersections into a central system," Jumpol said.

To complete the integrated system, the BMA plans to install more image-processing cameras, which are the key tool in collecting real-time traffic information. The number of these cameras will be increased from the present 152 cameras covering only 300 intersections, to enough of them to watch all 497 intersections by 2012, Jumpol said.

By then, the BMA aims to have integrated the ATC to cover 500 square kilometres of Bangkok, or one-third of the city's total area.

The new ATC Centre will be located at the BMA's new head office, which is expected to be established around 2012.

The BMA will also provide a traffic information service to both government organisations and ordinary travellers. It is working and sharing traffic information with 15 government organisations with responsibilities related to traffic flow, including the Thai Traffic Police, the Expressway Authority of Thailand, the Office of Transport and Traffic Policy and Planning and the Department of Land Transportation.

In providing a traffic-information service for ordinary travellers, the BMA has worked with partners including the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre and the Thai Traffic Police, to deliver information to commuters through a  variety of channels such as intelligent traffic information displays, websites and mobile phones, as well as television and radio stations.

"The BMA is not the only organisation responsible for traffic and transportation management. There are 16 organisations collaborating on transport and traffic management with the aim of giving Bangkok commuters a better way of travelling, to save costs, time and energy and eventually to remove Bangkok's traffic problems and help the country save the money it currently costs," Jumpol said.