Urban Transport Surveillance in Indian Context

By - Anoop Jha 

Only Fraction of Technology Potential is being utilised at present in India

Transport Surveillance in India is at nascent stage,  though it is vital for Transport Management of any city.

The implementation process is slow due to resource constraint and wherever it is implemented either technology is old or underutilized. While Transport surveillance covers a wide spectrum of functions related to planning and monitoring, only fraction of facility provided by advanced technology is being used in India at present. Urban Transport Surveillance is capable of capturing, processing and analyzing huge amount of data in real time and provide timely information to manage the complex nature and unpredictable nature of urban transportation. 

Urban Transport Surveillance package can include many functional and analytical aspects depending on the needs of client, It can give real time traffic movement feed on map by collating all the data captured from different strategic locations like Junctions, Transit Nodes, Multimodal Hubs, which can be accessed online by commuters, It can give stress alarm in case of congestion level and can suggest alternative route to commuters, can inform relevant authorities and departments regarding the stress situations, like damaged vehicle, damaged road of facility, accidents, fire, congestion etc. These technologies have intelligent alalytical tool witch can identify the actual cause of transport stress, for example, it can identify and track the cause of transport conflict, like unidentified objects, Vehicle in stress or any intentional mischief like vehicle going in wrong direction or person crossing the road at wrong place and time, based on pre-installed object templates using size, speed and direction of object, and can warn manual surveillance unit to take immediate action.It can also do behavioral tracking with or without manual assistance, which includes identifying person in stress, or in danger, or tracking suspicious behavior etc. In-spite of such wonderful facilities provided by urban surveillance technology we are utilizing only a fraction of it , and mostly in the monitoring of traffic rule offenders, and to issue challan or fine, which should be tackled by educating citizens backed by strict traffic regulations rather than relying on expansive cameras. Camera and surveillance infrastructure if to be installed or in place, should be used for wider purpose of integrated traffic management and transport research, rather than just recording or monitoring small fraction of traffic rule offenders.