Development of a cost-effective method to implement traffic management principles to a small city environment

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Small cities, defined as cities with a population of at most 300,000 people, would benefit from a Traffic Management Centre (TMC) to improve traffic operations but the model used for larger cities is often too expensive to implement. This research therefore investigates a cost effective traffic management model for a small-city environment. This traffic management model would be able to provide the necessary functionality of traffic management inherited from TMCs for a larger city. Two Test Models (TMs) were investigated which assessed the difference in functionality provided by conventional TMC practices (TM 1) and a proposed “minimal infrastructure model” (TM 2) to determine an optimal traffic management method that is cost-effective. The four core Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) that were identified for a small-city include: Arterial Management System (AMS), Incident Management System (IMS), Urban Traffic Management (UTM) and Transport Information Management (TIM). These four systems were tested within the study area of Stellenbosch. The level of functionality of the two TMs were compared. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, and Floating Car Data (FCD) were additional tools used in TM 2 in the attempt to achieve effective traffic management with minimal fixed infrastructure requirements. The TMs were investigated for the town of Stellenbosch, in the Western Cape of South Africa. This is a small city environment with significant traffic challenges, and which currently does not have a TMC. It was found that the level of detail in TMC operations required for larger cities is not the same as for smaller cities. In addition to this, effective traffic management can be provided to a small city by implementing the minimal infrastructure model (TM 2). Furthermore, it was found that by reducing the number of components on the roads of the study area and including FCD and UAVs to aid traffic management, the TMC capital and first year of operation cost could be reduced by 37% for the minimal infrastructure model, when compared to the traditional TMC setup used in large cities in South Africa.