Safety

The junction between A3 & A86 highways around Paris (France) sees a 2-lane and a 4-lane highway merge onto a 4-lane wide and 700 meter long viaduct. The junction is a heavily congested area. This project aimed at optimizing the road capacity of the viaduct by removing the hard shoulder in order to create an infrastructure with 5 traffic lanes in each direction instead of 4.

An Intelligent Transportation System was designed in order to keep a high level of safety for road users on a road section deprived of a hard shoulder but still experiencing a very dense traffic and a lot of lane switching.

This innovative concept, referred to as “Intelligent hard shoulder” made use of:

• Video surveillance CCTV system
• Video Detection system for Automatic Detection of stopped vehicles
• Information of road users by means of dynamic message signs ahead and

on the junction

• Retractable barriers system enabling to dynamically and physically recreate

a hard shoulder

After 2 years of operation, there is an obvious benefit on the project with the increase in road capacity on the A3/A86 junction itself, although the impact varies for sections of highways ahead and after the junction.

The equipment composing the Intelligent Transportation System demonstrated its ability to ensure an outstanding level of safety and security across the viaduct. The Video Detection system supplied efficient and reliable information enabling Traffic Operators to address quickly and adequately incidents occurring on the junction.

The project is an archetype of the benefits of ITS solutions for upgrading safety and providing congestion relief at a cost/benefit ratio far better than a conventional roadwork solution; it shows good potential to be implemented in a large number of other sites.

Citilog, Inc.

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

A frontal collision warning system (FCWS) for transit buses is introduced. The main purpose
of the transit FCWS is to help bus drivers avoid crashes. Given the fact that buses mostly run
in complex urban and suburban environments, it is a challenge for the system to keep high
sensitivity to frontal collision scenarios and give drivers timely true warnings while
suppressing the excessive nuisance and false warnings. The system architecture and the latest
developments of the warning algorithm are introduced. The verification test of the system is
discussed. The threat assessment in the warning algorithm is described. Categorization and
analyzes of scenarios and the statistic result are presented.

PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 6-10, 2005, San Francisco, California

Controlling traffic tunnels is a complex task which imposes serious requirements. Tunnel
safety depends largely on alerting motorists and tunnel personnel of a traffic incident in a
timely manner. Such an alert must be based on a reliable and complete monitoring of tunnel
activities. Highway tunnels are already equipped with basic video systems mainly for
supervising by tunnel stuff and guidance of emergency activities. Effective incident
management completely depends on fast incident detection and fast incident verification. Due
to the huge amount of information provided by video systems, image analysis might help
human operators to detect unexpected events and prevent dangerous situations.
This paper summarises our present study called VITUS-1. The feasibility study VITUS-1
defines a concept mainly based on digital video image analysis in order to accomplish the
following tasks: 1) automatically recognizing alarm situations in road tunnels; 2) alerting the
tunnel personnel and – if necessary – the road users; and 3) automatic storage of traffic
incident video sequences.

1ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH,
Autobahnen und Schnellstrassen-Finanzierungs-Aktien Gesellschaft (ASFiNAG)

ETM professional control GmbH

Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision - Graz University of Technology

PTV AG

ASTL

Presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 6-10, 2005, San Francisco, California

Rapidly developing economy evoked the increasing number of vehicles, and the urban traffic is already
overburdened. Nowadays if we cannot rapidly dispose the emergencies, such as traffic accident, vehicle
breaking, illegal driving and bad weather conditions, the traffic congestion will be diffused quickly, and
sometimes even worse to lead the local traffic paralysis. As to the emergencies have some
characteristics of the frequentness and uncertainty on time and space. It is a desirable problem
to solve among the major cities nation-wide that how to enhance the rapid response capability
to these emergencies, where the traffic policemen should appear immediately when they are
needed, how to avoid the diffusing of the traffic congestion and the traffic paralysis, etc.
Therefore we’ll introduce you the functions and characteristics of the Rapid Responding and
Disposing System of Road Traffic Emergency developed and used in the city of Dalian, China.
The followings are some details such as finding and disposing the road traffic congestion
rapidly, establishing and implementing the per-plans for special safekeeping assignments,
monitoring the illegal vehicles and traffics, real time traffic information transferring, and the
evaluating of the on duty policemen’s work.

Dalian, CHINA

Presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 6-10, 2005, San Francisco, California