Easing traffic congestion
"Testbed" promises intelligent solutions to traffic woes.
At least five days a week, Baher Abdulhai drives 45 km on the Greater Toronto Area’s roads between his lab at the University of Toronto and his home in Mississauga. Like everyone else out there, he often finds himself tied up in ever-increasing traffic congestion. And, also like everyone else, he hates it.
But here’s the difference with Abdulhai – he’s doing something about it.
As the founder and director of U of T’s unique-in-Canada Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Centre and Testbed, Abdulhai, also assistant professor of civil engineering, and his team are developing ways to ease the negative offshoots of our car-obsessed society – traffic congestion, decreased safety, and pollution.
The ITS centre is part of an emerging industry that is becoming a big business – estimates predict the global ITS market will grow to $200 billion over the next 25 years. “Twenty years ago, this industry didn’t even exist,” says Abdulhai. “The problems of increased traffic were obvious, but the classic solution was limited to building more roads, an option that was not only extremely expensive, but also failed to keep pace with traffic growth. But when information, communication and computing technologies became more advanced in the ’80s and early ’90s, we realized that you could use computers and new monitoring equipment to design real-time strategies that would enable traffic to be managed effectively with reasonable budgets.”
It was in California – infamous for its traffic jams and automobile-generated air pollution – where ITS got its real start. Abdulhai, originally from Cairo, became interested when working toward his Ph.D. at the University of California (Irvine) in 1993 and during post-doctoral work at UC Berkeley.
Recruited to U of T in 1998 to establish the ITS centre, Abdulhai has been the team leader of a “testbed,” which houses high-end computer facilities and a video wall dedicated to the development and testing of ITS technologies, as well as a virtual micro-simulation model of the Toronto road network which supplements the real-world data.
With major funding from the Ontario Research & Development Challenge Fund and partners from the government and the private sector, the facility’s real-time environment makes it a “perfect classroom for students and a superb research lab for developing new ITS technologies.”
Abdulhai says research will focus on a variety of projects, such as designing traffic control methods that capitalize on a network of vehicle detectors on the roads to make control responsive to traffic fluctuations.
“There is no one silver bullet. It’s a combination of better public transit, developing deployable ITS technologies and, in certain cases, increasing road capacity.”
And that’s the approach the ITS team is taking – combining state-of-the-art technology with what Abdulhai calls a “melting pot” of practitioners and researchers “to design strategies that can actually be put to use on the roads.”