“A city is a historically shaped type of settlement, defined by the existence of a specific partial community, concentrated in a certain area with a distinct organization, legally recognized and defined, and producing within the framework of its activity a set of durable material facilities with a specific physiognomy, which can be considered a specific type of landscape.”
The organizational complexity of cities creates a need for their continuous shaping in a way that ensures a high quality of life, especially considering that about 3/4 of the European population lives in cities. The concentration of industry, trade, and services creates many problems related to the functioning of cities. “Managing a city that is simultaneously a place of employment, residence, leisure, shopping, or cultural consumption must have not only an economic but also a social and ecological dimension. It must be efficient and effective in all its dimensions.” One of the factors affecting the quality of life is the transport system, which in cities includes the transport of people, goods, and the removal of waste and refuse. The development of transport infrastructure ensures better communication in cities, but it also brings with it problems such as the continuous growth of road traffic, high levels of air pollution, noise levels, and a significant threat to traffic safety. A problem for modern cities is simultaneously the decline in the number of public transport passengers and the increase in the use of private cars. This contributes to road congestion and the intensification of the phenomenon of traffic jams, which leads to a deterioration of living conditions, a reduction in investment, a limitation of the activity of economic entities, and thus to the inhibition of city development. On the urban road network, three types of congestion can be distinguished:
– bottleneck, which is associated with the formation of traffic jams in traffic heading through a given section of the network
– triggerneck, which arises when a bottleneck begins to hinder traffic not heading through a given section
– gridlock, which means the stopping of traffic on the entire street network in a given area, for example in the city center.
Traffic conditions in a city depend not only on the parameters of road transport infrastructure but also on its organization and the technical solutions used. In the dense development of city centers, the expansion or even reconstruction of transport infrastructure elements encounters numerous implementation limitations, if it is possible at all. Thus, improvements in road traffic conditions in cities can be expected primarily through the application of appropriate traffic organization and the use of modern technical means of traffic management. In reality, we are therefore not talking about expanding infrastructure in the city, but primarily about optimizing its use.
The complicated traffic situation that arises in modern cities places high demands on traffic management. It should be conducted on an ongoing basis, with a minimal time interval between the occurrence of an event and the reaction. With such requirements, ad-hoc observations of the situation on the roads and analysis of trends over a long period become insufficient, and continuous monitoring of vehicle traffic becomes a necessity. Technical means supporting effective traffic management in such conditions are primarily information technologies combined with solutions in the field of telecommunications. In this case, we are talking about transport telematics in cities, which indicates the simultaneous application (convergence) of information and telecommunication technologies in this area. These technologies ensure the speed of reaction, which is of fundamental importance in urban traffic management. One such technology is video monitoring systems. Presenting the benefits of their application in urban traffic management is the goal of this publication.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2008.