Recent developments of advanced technology in freeway management projects

Although successful deployment of new technology in Advanced Traffic Management Systems is constantly sought in Intelligent Transportation System projects, it is often not realised. One of the limited number of new technologies that is proving successful is wide-area video detection. In this paper successful deployment of this technology in freeway traffic management projects is presented. Even though the technology can be used in any traffic management application requiring vehicle detection, incident management appears to be its most popular application on freeways so far. This may be because incident detection, response and management are still one of the major challenges in urban freeway operations, requiring constant attention and considerable investment in manpower and equipment. However, despite efforts worldwide, fast and reliable automated incident detection has been elusive. In this paper, a new automated incident detection and management system based on wide-area video detection (machine vision) is briefly reviewed. Following many years of development and field implementation at several beta sites, the system has been substantially improved and a more sophisticated version was recently depoloyed on the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, New York. This paper describes the fieldable version of the system along with the resutls observed up to the time of the writing of this paper. So far the system successfully detected 81 per cent of the incidents, had no false alarms and reduced incident response time substantially. Deployment of the technology in various forms at several other sites for freeway management is also summarised.