Transport for London (TfL) has announced plans to put out a tender for data support for its proposed new real time traffic management scheme.
TfL’s “Data as a Service” model will feature real time traffic management, providing information on developments in London’s road traffic in less than a minute to help the city make the most of the infrastructure capacity available to it. The service is planned to roll out in two pilot stages, using an amalgamation of historical and real time traffic data. TfL, which supported 2.24 billion journeys across London in 2018, is reportedly hoping to work with a single data supplier to implement the service.
The real time traffic management programme will form part of TfL’s Surface Intelligent Transport System (SITS), which began in 2014 and aims to replace in full London’s network of traffic signals, incident control and highway management. The system will reduce congestion and improve air quality through increased use of real time traffic data harnessed from already existing detectors, mobile phones and compatible vehicles.
SITS is also intended to give increased priority to pedestrians, cyclists and users of public transport systems, in order to incentivise sustainable travel options. London has experienced a glut of road traffic creating growing pressure on infrastructure capacity, which SITS is designed to ameliorate; in addition to fulfilling TfL’s commitment to implementing a “Healthy Streets Approach” by guaranteeing the possibility of safe, active travel.
TfL, which will begin a formal tender process for data provision for the real time traffic management scheme in spring 2019, said: “Real time (< 60 secs latency) journey time and speed data will enable TfL to generate information relating to delay/congestion and journey time reliability and should have the ability to transform the common geography so that two way direction of travel is represented and data is mapped to this dual direction network.”
