Paving Intelligence into Safety, Security & Mobility

Spotlight: Managed lanes

Hard Shoulder Monitoring and Managed Lanes: a Cost Effective Solution to Tackle Congestion

The world’s largest cities are experiencing ever-growing traffic and congestion problems as more and more vehicles appear on the road. Limited land availability, scarce funds, and social and environmental concerns may prevent adding new freeway lanes. The combination of these factors is forcing transportation planners and engineers to explore new ways to more effectively operate the existing transportation network.

Managed lane facilities are another way to address the growing problem of traffic congestion by increasing freeway efficiency. They use various ITS equipment including Automatic Incident Detection (AID) systems.

The Eastern Ile-de-France region around Paris is one such area that experiences recurrent and heavy traffic jams. The idea was to open the hard shoulder to allow vehicles to use it when traffic was congested as long as no breakdown or accident required reinstating the shoulder. Citilog’s AID system was key to the implementation of the system as it allows a safe operation of the shoulder, enabling detection of stranded vehicles or accidents requiring that the shoulder be closed to traffic.

The total cost of the Intelligent Shoulder project was 40 times less expensive than the alternative projects involving actual road construction. The return on investment was less than 2 years. In addition, because of the on-going use of an AID system, the return on investment will continue to blossom as future incidents and congestion are now more efficiently monitored and managed.

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