Carpooling lanes, which have been introduced in many cities in United States, would help ease Dubai’s traffic problems, according to one expert.
Richard Harris, solutions director, Xerox International Transportation and Government Group, said because Dubai has developed so quickly, keeping up with the traffic management and control of its infrastructure.
Central to its traffic issues is the amount of cars on the road, and Harris told Arabian Business that in order to reduce the amount of vehicles, the emirate should consider introducing ‘high occupancy vehicle lanes’ and ‘high occupancy toll lanes’.
“All too often, there is one person in the vehicle so you get 100 vehicles, 100 people. In the United States, we’ve introduced high occupancy vehicle lanes and high occupancy toll lanes. With high occupancy vehicle lanes, you have to have three people in the vehicle to use it and you whizz through the traffic. With high occupancy toll lanes, you want to use the high occupancy vehicle lane, but you haven’t got enough people, so you can pay to use it,” he says.
The issue with these lanes is policing them, he says, and Xerox has come up with technology called vehicle occupancy detection, which is an automatic system of cameras that can identify the number of real people – not dummies – in a vehicle.
“Although it’s not enough to be used as evidence in a prosecution, it’s enough to be a deterrent, which is what you’re looking for. You can identify repeat offenders and target them,” he says.
Introducing high occupancy lanes, particularly on the highway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, would reduce the amount of cars and make a big difference to traffic, Harris says.
Xerox also has a solution to reduce time spent looking for a parking space. Using sensors in car parking spaces, drivers are quickly able to identify where the free spaces are.
“On the whole, you’ve probably got the right amount of infrastructure [in Dubai]. There are enough roads and enough parking, it’s just the time that people are using it [that creates an issue]. We all want to use it at the same time, so trying to smooth out the traffic is a really good way of doing it, and to reduce wasteful elements of journeys,” he says.
In a survey of UK cities, Xerox found that the minimum time that it took drivers to find on-street parking in their town was between 10 and 20 minutes.
“So if you extrapolate that for traffic going around a city, that’s a huge amount of waste of congestion, pollution and frustration. We’ve got this system in Los Angeles that we call ‘Merge’ and we’ve done is equip 6,000 on-street parking bays with sensors associated with the meters there. So we know everything about what’s happening at each parking bay. We take all the information and use data analytics to merge it with other information. And then we provide drivers with information about parking spaces,” he says.
The solution can also introduce a dynamic pricing algorithm that automatically adjusts parking rates at different parking bays.
“So if somewhere is really crowded, we can put the prices up, tell people and give them information on how to find nearby spaces that are available and no quite so expensive, which balances out the limited parking resource and increase efficiency. In Los Angeles, even though we reduced the prices at over 60 percent of the spaces, and only increased prices at 27% of the spaces, we still got a 2% increase in revenue. We also achieved a 10 percent reduction in the circling traffic,” he says.
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