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Business
User-friendly Highways
IF ONE were to drive down these days on the new, international quality, four-lane, dual carriageway National Highway No. 8 from Delhi to Jaipur, at a place called Kothputli, one would notice on the roadside, a bright orange box on a stand.
On approaching this box and opening its door, one can see a speaker inside and a button below.
Press the button and a disembodied voice will courteously call out: "This is the control room. How may I help you?"
Depending on one's need the controller (sitting at a monitor in the hub station of the system at a town called Shahpura some 40 km down the highway towards Jaipur) will offer guidance (the location of the nearest restauarant, for example) or send help (such as despatching an ambulance in case of an accident) .
This string of emergency call boxes, one every two kilometres along the highway, is a component of the country's first comprehensive highway traffic management system (HTMS).
Conceived by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) with consultancy from RITES, this pilot project on a 86 km stretch on NH 8, between Kothputli and Amber, has been jointly designed and executed by Siemens India Ltd., ICN India (a Siemens enterprise), Siemens Traffic Control Systems, Munich, and Siemens Traffic Controls Ltd., U.K.
The system, which took around a year to install, has been in operation from December 2001. Siemens will also be in charge of its operation and maintenance for an initial period of two years.
Besides the emergency call box network, the HTMS has other features such as:
* Video cameras installed at strategic locations to enable the control room to monitor critical stretches of the road such as crossings.
* Variable message signs, using LEDs (light emitting diodes), installed above the road to inform motorists about weather conditions, abnormalities ahead, such as traffic snarls due to an accident, oncoming facilities such as petrol stations and the like.
* Vehicle sensing induction loops installed below the road to keep tabs on traffic flow and also serve as a cross-check on toll collections.
* Meteorological sensors along the road at some places to obtain local weather data.
An optical fibre cable has been laid along the road, connecting all the equipment along the route to the control room. The control room itself, beside having monitors, telephone communications and mobile radio systems, has a computerised set up for storage and management of all communications between the controllers and the callers.
According to Sunil Lalla , Siemens India executive in charge, the pilot project has been a resounding success, in terms of enhancing highway safety, sometimes in ways which were never anticipated by the project planners.
He mentions one instance when a couple of drunken persons from a wayside village dozed off on the highway and could have caused a major accident. They were detected by a motorist who informed the control room from a call box and the controller in turn alerted a mobile police patrol which picked up the drunks.
S. S. P. Sinha of the Corridor Management Division in NHAI pointed out that the bulk of the road transportation cost of goods and passengers was accounted for by road usage cost and not the cost of construction and maintenance of the road. Systems like the HTMS were aimed at reducing this user cost.
The next few HTMS projects for NHAI in the pipeline are completing the Delhi-Jaipur stretch, Delhi-Agra , Panipat- Jullundur and Jhansi-Panagarh. Ultimately, the entire North-South, East-West and Golden Quadrilateral corridors, totalling over 13,000 km, will be equipped with this facility. Regional and State highway authorities and private road operators are also expected to install such systems in future. At Rs. 10 to 15 lakhs per km, HTMS is slated to be big business in the coming years.
N. N. Sachitanand
in Bangalore
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