Technology is set to reshape city streets around the world this century, with AI and sensor networks enhancing road safety, cutting pollution and curbing congestion. ITS technology is forecast to grow rapidly in the coming decade, from $48.61 billion last year to $170.94 billion by 2034. AI as well as Internet of Things (IoT) sensors will be key to this.
Street-level sensors collect vast amounts of data to be processed and analysed by AI, helping city leaders to make the right decisions when it comes to getting traffic moving. To get the most out of such systems, city leaders must be unafraid to try cutting-edge technologies such as radar sensors, which can help to make sense of traffic, boosting safety and offering insights to make streets smarter.
The adoption of ITS will be crucial to paving the way for cleaner, more sustainable transport, and will usher in the arrival of technologies such as fully self-driving cars. Addressing the complex urban mobility challenges of today and tomorrow requires careful planning around which sensors to deploy in order to detect incidents, for example, or detect the amount and type of traffic going through a certain junction. Making the right choices now will create the foundation of tomorrow’s most efficient cities.
Street-level sensors will be the linchpin of ITS systems, offering the Big Data that AI traffic algorithms depend on to curb congestion and prevent accidents, and helping to do everything from managing air pollution levels to dispatching emergency vehicles faster. This is where radar-based sensors can really make a difference.
Why radar works better
Many current sensor technologies are inadequate when it comes to delivering data for ITS systems. Loop coils are still the most widely-used traffic sensors in many cities around the world, but they have distinct limitations. While the sensors themselves are relatively cheap, they are installed under concrete in an expensive and invasive procedure, last only a few years, and do not deliver information such as what type of vehicle has driven over them, or at what speed.
Likewise, camera systems have their own issues, including concerns over privacy. Cameras are useful for detecting issues such as drowsy drivers, but cameras become less accurate and useful in low-light conditions or weather such as heavy fog.
“The adoption of ITS will be crucial to paving the way for cleaner, more sustainable transport”
Camera sensors also have difficulty providing real-time insights or analysis due to the heavy computational load. Today’s advanced radar systems have none of these limitations and are able to detect not only the number of vehicles, but also their type and their speed.
Radar sensors are just as precise regardless of whether it is day or night, and work whatever the weather. Radar sensors are also relatively cheap, meaning that these sensors are highly scalable for use in city-wide ITS systems.
Putting radar to work
In the Italian city of Verona, the Porta Nuova gate was built between 1532 and 1540 and designed by architect Michele Sanmicheli, and still stands today.
The junction around the gate has seen high traffic congestion for decades, with five entrance lanes and six exit lanes forming the main artery for the city.
In partnership with the City Of Verona (Comune di Verona) and Famas Systems, Bitsensing deployed TraXight, our companion solution for ITS to our existing Traffic Insight Monitoring Sensor (Timos) hardware product. TraXight was created to visualise all the rich data from Timos.
For Verona’s city leaders, radar has been key to gaining full understanding of what vehicles are driving through the Porta Nuova, with a view to reducing pollution, cutting congestion and improving road safety by monitoring dangerous driving – and also preserving a historic site.
The city of 700,000 inhabitants installed 10 sensors integrating both camera sensors and radar around the junction. Offering city leaders continuous, reliable real-time data traffic data, the radar sensors use ‘point clouds’ to categorise vehicles as cars, motorcycles and trucks, with the sensors able to identify up to 256 vehicles at a time within a range of 300m.
Using 4D radar imaging, the sensors deliver information including queue length, traffic volume, and turning movements, as well as illegal manoeuvres, empowering authorities with data delivered by clear dashboards and helping the city to finally understand and deal with its issues around congestion.
TraXight is also a part of the K-City Network Project by the Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, which launched in 2020 and is aimed at creating smarter cities worldwide, through partnerships with South Korean-based technology companies. Bitsensing installed 120 sensors along an 81km stretch of South Korea’s Nonsan-Cheonan Expressway, along with sensors on other highways, tunnels and roadways.
Building the streets of the future
The information provided by radar sensors also offers the potential to improve road safety. With previous generations of sensors unable to detect cars in foggy and low-light conditions, radar sensors can offer traffic authorities information on not just how many vehicles are in an area, but what types and what speeds they are going. By understanding, for example, how many vehicles are travelling fast along a foggy motorway at night, traffic managers can move towards a predictive approach to accidents, alerting emergency services that a problem might be about to occur.
Advanced radar sensors will be a foundational technology in making tomorrow’s streets safer, less congested and less polluted. For traffic officials and city leaders, radar sensors will form a crucial part of the ITS systems that will reshape the way people travel, with a predictive approach to accidents, and real-time traffic reporting which will keep streets less congested and air safer to breathe. In the cities of the future, radar will be the ‘eyes’ that watch the roads to keep us all safe.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Euichul Kim is vice president of Industrial Business Center at Bitsensing
