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Government Analytics, Government Data Management

Hong Kong to develop traffic and incident management system

By Clarice Africa | 10 March 2011

A US$12.8 million system has been proposed tofacilitate the traffic and transport incident management and dissemination of real-time traffic and transportation information.

Hong Kong’s Commissioner for Transport, Joseph Lai Yee-tak, with the full support of the Secretary for Transport and Housing, and the Government Chief Information Officer, proposes to develop the Traffic and Incident Management System in the Transport Department.

The proposal stemmed from the Transport Department’s (TD) needs to further improve its methods in handling traffic and transport incidents by taking advantage of the advancement in today’s latest traffic management technology.

Currently, the traffic incident management processes in the TD’s Emergency Transport Coordination Centre (ETCC) apart from being manually operated, doesn’t have a data sharing platform that would disseminate real-time traffic and transport information to the public.

In addition, the ETCC handles an estimated number of 3000 traffic and transport incidents per year, which grows at an annual rate of 2-3 per cent which further stresses the importance of developing the current traffic incident management system.

Based on the project report from the TD, the proposed TIMS will be a computerised system that would streamline the dissemination of traffic and transport information to concerned stakeholders and the public, and would perform automatic incident detection and generate suggested traffic and transport contingency plans to reduce traffic incident duration and speed up mobilisation contingencies for quicker traffic incident recovery.

According to the TD, it is estimated that the TIMS can reduce the duration of a traffic incident by an average of ten minutes due to the availability of response plan options for decision making and more efficient mobilisation of recovery teams, thereby enabling affected roads to resume normal traffic quicker and reduce the number of vehicles caught in traffic.

In addition, dissemination of real-time information can reduce the severity of the traffic impact during incidents by alerting motorists of vehicle congestion near incident areas.

The proposed TIMS will include the following functions: 1. Real-time traffic information from closed-circuit televisions, journey times, traffic speeds, and density data, to perform incident detection. 2. A Knowledge Based Expert System (KBES) which would generate incident responses to help optimise and expedite response activities. 3. A sub-system that would connect all relevant stakeholders such as the Hong Kong Police Force, Highways Department, public transport operators, and onsite incident response teams. 4. A data platform that would disseminate real-time traffic and transport information direct to the public through traveller information kiosks to be installed at strategic locations.

Based on the project report provided to Futuregov Asia Pacifc, the TIMS will be tested and commissioned by the second quarter of 2015.

The development of TIMS is one the Hong Kong Government’s five major technology projects, which outgoing GCIO, Jeremy Godfrey said will receive the highest budget in the next few years.

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