Big brother on the road: Cruise control

Dubai Every Dubai motorist has been there – stuck in gnarled traffic inching along at a painfully slow crawl for what seems hours.

But despite assumptions that traffic in the city is growing beyond control, roads officials maintain they are very much in control of traffic movement at almost every step of the way.

Unlike Dubai Police which monitors traffic for violations, a secret control centre – quietly opened in August 2007 by the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) – is scanning the city’s roads using remote cameras and pavement sensors to keep more than 860,000 vehicles moving along at peak times of the day.

Nerve centre

RTA officials refused to disclose the location of the Dh85-million control centre for security reasons, given that it is the nerve centre for routing traffic across the city.

Salah Mohammad Al Marzouqi, RTA’s Director of Intelligent Traffic Systems, heads a team of about two dozen operators who staff the control centre 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

At the heart of the control centre is what’s called the Intelligent Traffic System, an automated computer system that can be manually overridden in heavy traffic conditions by an operator to clear overflowing highways, roads and intersections. “If there is a problem that the system can’t automatically handle by itself, the operator reacts,” Al Marzouqi said.

Street monitors

Staffed by engineers and trained operators, all eyes at the centre are focused on a giant wall full of display monitors fed by live images from more than 100 cameras posted randomly at 250 intersections and strategic roadways.

A further 150 cameras at two smaller control centres dedicated to the Airport Tunnel and Al Shindagha Tunnel can also be accessed directly through the main control centre, Al Marzouqui said.

As of 1996, there were only 14 such traffic cameras in the city, he said.
Seated in his office, with the flick of his wrist Al Marzouqui demonstrated from his laptop how an operator can easily spot trouble from his workstation.

Spotting cars

Using a large GIS map of Dubai, each intersection or hot spot is indicated by an icon and simply by clicking with his mouse, Al Marzouqui called up one of the RTA cameras positioned high atop a skyscraper on Shaikh Zayed Road.

High-definition live video showed slow-moving traffic.

Using his mouse, Al Marzouqui moved the camera to the left and then zoomed in with great accuracy and clarity on vehicles travelling below.

With the same ease, if an intersection is choked with traffic, an operator can first examine the intersection via closed-circuit television and then “simply asks the system for more time” increasing the green light for any one direction of traffic.

Traffic free flow

However, the beauty of the system is that the system’s smart cameras are capturing live data that is processed by computers which talk to each other in the centre to keep traffic flowing across the whole system.

Average traffic speeds and accident scenes are collected from cameras and sensors through a program called Automatic Incident Detection. That data is then analysed and relayed to an operator.

The information is not wasted, he said.

Direct alerts

Thanks to the RTA installation of 20 new electronic message boards across Dubai roads and highways, motorists can now be directly alerted from the control centre of any rapid changes ahead.

For example, if there is a serious accident on a highway and a lane has been blocked, traffic in that posted 100 km/h speed zone will almost come to a halt in order to clear the accident scene.

Once the accident details are logged by the control room, direct messages are sent to motorists to slow down, stay in the right lane or reduce speed.

“It is very useful,” said Al Marzouqui, “because the driver knows he should slow down.

This is advanced information so that the driver will not be surprised. It is very important to divert people for safety reasons.”