Bangalore City, has witnessed a phenomenal growth in vehicle population. As a result, many of the arterial roads and intersections are operating over the capacity (i.e., v/c is more than 1) and average Journey speeds on some of the key roads in the Central Area are lower than 10 kmph in the peak hour.

Therefore, it has become necessary to establish plans for efficient traffic management in Bangalore. In this regard, Bangalore City Police have envisaged the "Bangalore Traffic Improvement Project - B-TRAC 2010" and the objectives of BTRAC 2010 being to:

• Reduce traffic congestion by 30% in the Central Area of Bangalore City
• Reduce accidents by 30% in the city of Bangalore
• Achieve significant reduction in pollution
• Achieve substantial compliance of Traffic Laws and Rules
• Set up an effective Trauma Care System

Various components form a part of the improvement plan, some of them being:

• Road markings
• Signage–Over head & Stand alone
• Enforcement Cameras – 5 nos. at critical locations
• Surveillance Cameras – 160 nos.
• Upgradation of Signals including Vehicle Actuation – 182 nos.

All these activities are in various stages of completion and in order to establish an integration of all the components an Interim Traffic Management centre has been set up and the same is located on the Commissariat Road in the first floor of the Ashoknagar Police Station.

The Traffic Management Center (TMC) at the Ashok Nagar Police station is the hub of a transportation management system, where information about the transportation network shall be collected and combined with other operational and control data to manage the transportation network and to produce traveler information.

The Interim Traffic Management Centre has been designed to house a traffic wireless system, traffic surveillance system, traffic signaling system, traffic help line, traffic planning operations, etc that are being deployed under BTRAC 2010, and it shall handle the following components:

• Information/data from the traffic signals from the 182 signals spread across the city
• Live feed of images from the 160 surveillance cameras installed at various junctions in the city
• Traffic violation data from the 5 enforcement cameras installed in the city.

The TMC shall link various elements of Intelligent Transportation Systems such as vehicle actuated traffic signals, surveillance cameras, enforcement cameras etc., installed at various locations in the city as a part of BTRAC 2010, enabling decision makers to identify and react to an incident in a timely manner based on real-time data. The TMC will help reduce incident response times, lower incident rates (mainly secondary incidents), disseminate traveler information and hence reduce congestion and enhance safety.

Operations

The TMC would receive the data/information from the field and the same would be received, understood and decisions would be made and the decision so made from the center shall be communicated to the end user to act on it to achieve the desired result.

In order to enable better understanding of the situation, domain experts in the form of Transportation Engineers shall also be housed in the TMC to provide their expertise in analyzing and communicating the desired output on the field.


Traffic Signals

From the traffic signal system, a steady flow of traffic signal timings, traffic flow data etc would be received and this real time data will to be processed immediately to achieve a synchronized/optimized effect on the chosen corridors.

The TMC shall receive the real time data from the field and the same shall be witnessed on a monitor and then optimized plan will be generated. The plans so generated then shall be communicated to the local police officers on the field either through the wireless system present in the TMC or by the operations team.

Traffic Surveillance cameras

The cameras located at 160 strategic locations across the city would be beaming live pictures into the TMC.

The traffic management team shall look at the live feeds coming in from the field and then based on certain parameters like tolerable queue length, congestion or an accident/incident that has occurred on the filed would be able to communicate to the field officers and necessary action will be initiated. Also violations occurring on the filed can be seen through the system and recorded for further use as evidence in the court and also action initiated through communication to the field officers.

Traffic Enforcement Cameras

The enforcement cameras located at 5 locations across the city would be recording and beaming the violations into the TMC. The enforcement team would have to download the violations and then transfer the information to the automated enforcement system.

Communications - Wireless network

The decisions so made from the TMC will be communicated to the officers on the field and for this the wireless equipment available with the Police will be made use of.

Traffic Helpline

The TMC would house the traffic helpline (103) on which road users can register their grievances, which would then be addressed in a time bound manner.

The traffic management center is being dedicated to the citizen's of Bangalore City on April 4, 2008 with an objective of providing a dynamic approach to address the traffic decongestion needs. Bangalore City Police promises that it will live up to the expectations of the city.

This is in an interim arrangement that shall be available from now onwards for the next few years and in the near future a permanent traffic management center is being built in the traffic headquarters located on Infantry Road, Bangalore. These components when completed will deliver the final results as chartered out by the BTRAC 2010 objectives.