Kick out the jams: geospatial software and the battle against congestion
Planners from the Highways England, TfL, TfWM and Crossrail on the vital role of data sharing and GIS in keeping the country moving
No-one, with the possible exception of drunken students, likes traffic cones. Cones are synonymous with delay, frustration, road rage, missed appointments, late deliveries and political footballs. No good can come of them. Surely, it is no coincidence that the downfall of John Major's government occurred just after the announcement of the ‘cones hotline'? Cones represent a clear danger to the people who have to put them out, but traffic congestion is also a hazard to the health of road users and city dwellers alike. Congestion has big numbers attached to it, all of them negative.
About a quarter of air pollution in cities is caused by cars stuck in traffic or idling at lights.
Drivers stuck in traffic with vehicles in front of them are exposed to 29 times more pollutant particles than cars travelling freely along the highway.
UK drivers wasted an average of 31 hours in rush-hour traffic last year, costing each motorist £1,168.
Globally there are in excess of 7 million deaths a year as a result of air pollution. Air pollution in the UK is a major cause of diseases such as asthma, eczema, lung disease, stroke, heart disease and itchy eyes, and is estimated to cause 40,000 premature deaths each year.
In London alone research by King's College London estimates that it contributes to around 9,500 deaths a year. TfL's Healthy Streets initiative estimates that if every Londoner walked at least 20 minutes a day that could save the NHS £1.7bn in treatments.
There are 44 cities throughout the UK that match or exceed the air pollution limits set by the WHO.
Outdoor air pollution grew 8 per cent globally in the past five years.
Traffic congestion cost UK drivers more than £37.7bn in 2017, with the UK ranking as the tenth most congested country in the world and the third most congested in Europe, behind only Russia and Turkey. Inrix and the Centre for Economic and Business Research estimate that between 2013 and 2030 the total punitive cost of congestion and gridlock on the UK economy will be £307bn.
These figures represent significant impacts in terms of health, wellbeing and the economy. Of course, new roads can be built but that just takes the problem elsewhere. What's needed is a combination of viable alternatives to road transport, better management of peak traffic, cleaner vehicles and behavioural change.
The impact of road and rail maintenance on congestion also needs to be reduced. Cones should be a last resort rather than the first thing the authorities reach for.
Tackling congestion requires careful coordination between government agencies, local authorities, businesses and individuals, some of which might have conflicting priorities. City centre shops want cheap parking while authorities may be keen to keep traffic out by encouraging cycling and public transport, for example.
Communication is made all the more difficult by the fact that there is often no single source of the truth. If there's one thing worse than traffic cones it's data silos.
Up the junction
Fans of The Apprentice will be familiar with the amusingly anachronistic task in which the teams are required to track down and purchase obscure objects across London. The artifice comes from the fact that they are not allowed to use a search engine to find the items and must navigate with paper maps - not easy for millennials. Generally speaking, they fail miserably, which means that Alan Sugar can shout at them in the boardroom, which makes for better TV.
This situation mirrors that endured by many planning authorities and partner organisations as they wrestle with transport issues. In some cases planning systems go back to the age of the fax. While collaboration does not actually happen via fax any more, it's only recently that APIs and visualisation techniques have been fully embraced.
Stuart Lester is data innovation lead at Transport for West Midlands (TfWM). Transport tends to be "very CAD-based and ‘engineeringy'" he said, with little attention paid to data sharing and visualisation.
"As someone coming from IT [APIs and geospatial visualisation tools are] something that could and probably should be utilised some time ago. It's a matter of organisational maturity," he said.
The rather lovely Junction 6 on the M42
Lester and his team face a perfect storm in the coming years. Junction 6 on the M42, is being upgraded by highways England with work due to start in 2020. This is one of the busiest motorway junctions in the UK carrying 250,000 people a day. At around the same time, the high-speed rail project HS2 needs to tunnel under the junction. To pile on the pressure a bit more, in 2021 Coventry will be hosting many events as it takes on the mantle of UK City of Culture, and in 2022 the West Midlands hosts the Commonwealth Games.
As anyone who has driven around Birmingham will know, traffic congestion can be a huge problem here at the best of times, even without the extra stresses. The problem affects the region's car makers as much as everyone else.
"One of the major Jaguar Land Rover plants is right by that junction and if you get Crufts at the NEC at the same time as a problem with Birmingham Airport it leads to gridlock and it affects their just-in-time production line," said Lester, adding that an hours' loss on the production line can cost the car maker £5 million.
Being an IT man I want to work out how to load balance the road network - Stuart Lester, TfWM
"Being an IT man I want to work out how to load balance the network," Lester said. "We have to work with authorities and businesses and schools to work out how to move people around in the most efficient way."
For the avoidance of chaos it is vital that all parties are communicating properly and that all have shared access to up-to-date and accurate information. London faced similar challenges in the run-up to the Olympic Games. Transport for London (TfL) is in charge of the rail and Tube networks and also the main arterial roads running through the Capital. Other roads are the responsibility of individual boroughs. In the runup to the games it became very obvious very quickly that things have to change if the city were not to grind to a halt. Something radical had to be done.
Sticking with the status quo would have meant having to create 300 new PDF maps every day for the duration of the Games, and distributing them to the boroughs, police and other parties as the situation on the transit links changed, something that obviously wasn't remotely feasible.
Works management was a fairly ad hoc process involving multiple spreadsheets and people just picking up the phone and asking ‘what's going on in your area?', said Fiona Clowes, geographic information systems lead at TfL.
"It was very disparate. Everyone worked in silos with data sitting on servers that people couldn't access and it wasn't very well managed. We needed a strategy and an enterprise-wide view of the data." said Clowes.
This is when TfL started to get serious about introducing geospatial technologies to represent real-time information on a map. TfL was certainly not short of data but it was siloed and the organisation lacked ways to present it clearly and make it easily accessible to those who needed it. TfL started to build a ‘Service Playbook' which featured a series of geographical information system (GIS) applications built on software from geospatial vendor and consultancy Esri. Having all the information in one place and accessible via a visual UI means that planners and engineers, be they in boroughs, highways agencies, cycling planners or safety officers, now had access to the information via a self-service portal.
The City Planner tool divides London into 15,000 hexagonal units each about the size of the O2 Arena
The system proved itself during the Olympic Games and since then new applications have been added to the Service Playbook. One of these is in the City Planner tool, which divides London into 15,000 hexagonal units each about the size of the O2 Arena. Plotted across these units are 200 datasets and 50 million data points concerned with safety, land use, demographics and the like, which can be used operationally and also to enable strategic modelling. Each hexagonal unit can be targeted for interventions to support the Mayor's transport strategy.
"We've been working with Esri to bring all this data together to gain insight" said Joe Stordy, data and spatial analysis manager at TfL. "It helps us target interventions. So the idea is we can look at one of these spatial units and say this is a location where we have issues with bus performance, this is somewhere where there's an issue with safety. We can look at datasets together in an integrated way and that helps us to target investment."
This information is also shared with London boroughs, and ultimately elements of it may also be shared with the public and made available to third-party app developers in the spirit of open data. One obstacle is the ongoing contract with Ordnance Survey which is a quasi-private company, but Stordy said the organisation is looking at open source alternatives for mapping data and also the new Geospatial Commission is looking at ways to open the OS's MasterMap data.
3D image of the Portal at Royal Oak, London
Going underground
Geospatial software and data sharing have played a big role underneath the streets of London too. During the excavation of the East-West Crossrail tunnels, 3 million tonnes of spoil was taken by truck and barge to Essex where it was used in the creation of a nature reserve in Wallasea Island. This activity overlapped with the 2012 Olympic Games, but by sharing data with TfL and other agencies Crossrail managed to create routes and schedules for the lorries so that its activities didn't impact on the Games.
The route of the Crossrail tunnels had to be planned and implemented to an extremely fine tolerance to avoid underground obstacles including secret tunnels under the American embassy and Tottenham Court Road Tube station.
Dan Irwin of Crossrail
"The tunnel boring machine had to go between the pilings and the Northern line platform which is just underneath and the tolerance was about 300mm." said Dan Irwin, geospatial lead at Crossrail.
The process was akin to threading a large needle with a very thick thread, he said. The tunnel boring machine (TBM) weighed 1,000 tonnes, was 150m long and drilled out cavity of diameter 7.6m.
"It was a big old beast," said Irwin. "Together with London Underground we developed our own coordinate system from our GIS system called London Survey Grid and we got the tolerance down from 200mm to less than 5mm over a kilometre. That helped tremendously because it meant they didn't have to close Tottenham Court Road while the TBM went through."
A big old beast. A crossrail tunnel boring machine
Time and space
Geospatial software allows you to make all necessary information available by clicking on the relevant area on a map. But just as important is hiding the clutter of irrelevant data from view.
A particularly useful feature is time sliding. For Crossrail, whose data goes back to the 19th century, it was helpful for archaeologists who unearthed several finds including the skeletons of plague victims. Other uses are perhaps more prosaic but no less essential.
"The time sliding capability is very, very powerful," said TfL's Clowes. "You can choose the date and time that you're interested in, say three years ahead, then things happening 10 years ahead disappear. That's a really useful tool."
Time sliding is also helpful in the predictive modelling required to planned infrastructure investment and also push changes of behaviour to get people walking, cycling, using public transport instead of driving through Britain's congested cities, and to see how population change will impact certain areas.
"Being able to slide through the datasets is really fascinating," said Stordy. "You can see how the forecast growth in East London is going to affect things and it allows us to have a much better view about what London is going to look like."
Can I dig it? No you can't
Constant roadworks caused by utilities laying cables and pipes without consulting each other are still depressingly familiar. If only they'd wait and do it all at once. Even within an agency it is not uncommon for while lines to be painted and the road dug up again a few weeks later. In theory at least, better systems for sharing and visualising data should help improve this situation.
How long before this is dug up and has to be repainted?
Chris Spencer, intelligence and performance lead, regional programme office at Highways England, spoke about one such case in where £13m was saved by not doing something, or by pairing things up.
This was a planned intervention on the A404, Berkshire. Spencer's colleague asked him to use GIS software to look at other interventions in the area.
"We visualised everything for him and found a couple of roundabout schemes going on, as well as the smart motorway project on the M4. So he got in touch with all the people the app said were in charge of these particular schemes and from that he was able to sit down with them in the one room and review all the benefits those schemes will be creating."
The upshot of this process was that the planned scheme was mothballed as existing schemes looked likely to deliver the desired improvements on their own.
"We saved £13m by not delivering this scheme and we avoided all those extra roadworks too."
Back in Birmingham, Lester's team are monitoring the traffic on the M42 in preparation for the coming storm.
"That's where the spatial stuff comes into it. We feel that underpinning all our key mitigations is the data. We're looking at similar projects to see what's going well what hasn't gone well, how can we communicate that information better with the public and businesses so they can make reasonable decisions from a trusted source of information. And we've got to learn from the likes of TfL who've got a lot more experience of how to do this sort of thing as a result of the Olympics and just the day-to-day management of traffic in London."
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