The tool ’Enable’ aids coordination among the various stakeholders to tackle traffic congestion in a city. Presently this process is time-consuming due to many issues, few being lack of data availability, non-standardized and validated datasets, administrative matters, lack of capacity and most importantly lack of a common platform to share, visualise and analyse data.
Data collection application
Real-time insights
Easy to use dashboard
Storing Historical data
Capturing Grievances
'ENABLE' has the capacity to reflect a city's traffic congestion and it's related issues precisely. It allows transit agencies and ULBs/smart cities to monitor the city traffic in real-time and provides detailed urban traffic insights for better decision making. The USP of the tool of correlating live and static parameters makes it different from the other tools available in the market.
‘Enable’ tool will reflect the pattern of congestion, which can be used by various stakeholders in the city for further detailed study and action for traffic hotspots. This consists of major datasets like accident data, NOC data, Waterlogging and pothole data with and also the grievances were collected from the Traffic dept. Pune Traffic Police and Pune Municipal Corporation are the primary stakeholders as the dashboard will help them to visualize and analyze the city’s traffic scenario and the collector app will help to digitise and store the data.
President, CEPT University, Ahmedabad
The team interacted with mentor Prof. Bimal Patel and Mission Director Mr Kunal Kumar and identified Urban Sutra no.3 "Not static master-plans but evolving ecosystems" of the National Urban Policy Framework to fit in their identified problem on a need of dynamic master planning. On discussion with several sectoral experts, reviewers, Ministry officials, the team narrowed down their problem statement to dynamic traffic planning.
The team undertook literature studies to understand the causes, effects, impacts of traffic congestion and practices undertaken around the globe to manage traffic effectively and efficiently. The literature review concluded with providing a narrowed research gap of co-relating static and dynamic parameters for real-time traffic monitoring of traffic congestion.
Meanwhile, the team also went through a process of comparative analysis of cities selected in the first phase of the smart cities mission to identify 3 cities to pilot the project. The team defined its own parameters for the shortlisting process like traffic data availability, the eagerness of the city to do traffic monitoring after floating a mail to various CEO’s, team also examined various smart city proposals of round 1 cities to check which city has focused of traffic monitoring or aims to develop a city mobility plan. Cities were also analyzed with respect to data maturity, city size and whether it’s a tier 1, 2 or 3 cities.
The team along with the mentors reviewed various smart city proposals to finalise the pilot city. Projects concentrating on Traffic management systems, IoT projects were shortlisted. From these shortlisted cities, Comprehensive mobility plan for cities was undertaken to study. Data availability from cities was inquired. Availability of real-time map provider's was checked and then, Pune was the only city to be accurately fitting into the checklist of city selection. Hence, Pune was chosen as the pilot city for the project.
The team visited the city of Pune and interacted with the officials in Pune Smart city, Traffic Police, Pune Municipal Corporation, Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority and various other stakeholders related to Traffic, discussed issues faced by these stakeholders in managing issues leading to traffic congestion and carried out a field survey in the city wherein team analyzed almost 8 major junctions in the city and identified reason of congestion.
Team also went through an exercise of collecting datasets related to traffic and received accident and NOC data from Traffic police, ITMS and VTS data API from Pune smart city, encroachment and pothole data from Pune Municipal Corporation.
The team designed the tool architecture under the guidance of the mentor, mission director and various field experts such as the technical team at India Urban Observatory in Ministry to understand the database management and process of tool integration. The back end and front end of the dashboard was conceptualised by the team and later developed by Mr Pushkar Adhikari.
The team studied various analytical methods to undertake analytical outputs through the dashboard post co-relating datasets. With an in-depth study, the team decided to go ahead with weighted analysis as a method. The team undertook a survey to understand the causes of traffic congestion for every traffic division.The team, with help of traffic dept. floated the survey on social media, to which responses nearly to 1350 were received from all parts of the city with adequate suggestions and complaints. Team also undertook manual surveys, nearly in every traffic division and tried to make conversation with locals, daily commuters, rickshaw and bus drivers. The output of the survey helped to understand the problem areas wrt the causes of traffic congestion.
The team had to go through a long process for feeding the data into the dashboard as the data received was in the Marathi language which had to be translated and digitized later it had to be geotagged and fed on GIS. To ease this tedious process of data feeding team designed a web app which was developed by Mr Daniyal Abbasi.
The phase-I of the dashboard 'Enable' was successfully launched on 13th December 2019 at the Pune Smart City Operations Center under the Pune Urban Data Exchange Datathon. The dashboard was launched by Mr Kunal Kumar, Mission Director, Smart Cities Mission(SCM), MoHUA and Ms Rubal Agarwal, Addl. Municipal Commissioner, Pune and CEO, Pune Smart City Development Corporation Limited (PSCDCL). The dashboard was integrated at the SCOC, Pune. The team, post the launch, conducted studies to validate traffic hotspots that have come across through the analysis from the dashboard. The team based on the hotspot identification by the ‘Enable’ dashboard and their 3-day site validation process suggested planning strategies to the traffic dept. for major 3 hotspots of the city.
