The sharp rise in the number of vehicles in India is causing heavy traffic jams and grid locks on National Highways. Congestion on highways has been the lead cause of numerous accidents and has been claiming several casualties over the decades. To add to commuter’s woes, the manual method of toll collection is cumbersome and in turn causes congestion at Toll plazas.
So as of now, the main aim of the National Highways Authority of India has been to reduce traffic jams on highways through vehicle diversion and automatic toll collection. NHAI’s new smart traffic control includes image processing for traffic diversion, programmable logic for data handling and uses of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags for automatic toll collection. But the major concern of the NHAI is the safety of the highway commuters.
With an aim to provide safety to highway commuters in the real-time scenarios, NHAI will install video surveillance systems at all major Toll Plazas for real-time mapping of the traffic congestion. NHAI has initiated this project as video surveillance at the toll plazas can not only informs the passengers about the road conditions but also helps to reduce vandalism on the National Highways.
The Video surveillance system under the NHAI will be highly equipped to deal with congestion, in providing detailed real-time information about traffic flow which allows the traffic management authority to execute decisions quickly. This smart traffic technology highlights the issues to the NHAI so that the services of the authority can be improved before it becomes significant enough.
It will be a 24X7 service which provides a real-time feed to the control rooms of the regional offices. And the NHAI hopes that the execution of the project will be completed in the next six months. In the first phase, the cameras will be installed in 10 toll plazas and gradually it will bring another 200 toll plazas under the video surveillance where daily traffic flow is more than 10,000 vehicles.
To manage the entire highway network using sophisticated audio-visual technology, Shri Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Road, Transport, and Highways, announces that soon NHAI will sign an agreement with Korean Expressway Corporation. The wide range of cameras will be installed to provide the exact information what is needed for each specific section of the National Highway.
These cameras will watch over each and every lane, automatically by capturing images of the license plate details of all the vehicles and then passes the recorded images to the regional offices which are providing 24X7 services. It will increase the reliability of the traffic control by controlling the movement of the vehicles hopefully it will also reduce the waiting time for the highway commuters.
NHAI designs and develops a high-end machine vision surveillance systems, retail intelligence system and traffic management systems for civilian use. At the toll booths, the Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) records the video feeds which includes information such as Lane ID, User’s ID, registration number, so that the control room can track the vehicle easily.
For providing a real-time feed to the command and control room at regional offices, each toll plaza will get high-quality cameras. And NHAI already provided 100mbps internet network connectivity to all the regional offices to provide better services to the highway commuters.