Analytics Used to Tackle Commuter Pain | WPN World People News

As the majority of the world's population moves to metropolitan areas, key city systems, including city streets and transportation systems, are being strained to the breaking point.

The 2011 IBM Commuter Pain Survey ranked the emotional and economic toll of commuting in cities around the world.

Some cities are already suffering major problems. The 2011 IBM Commuter Pain Survey polled more than 8,000 commuters in 20 cities around the world and ranked the emotional and economic toll of commuting. In about a half dozen of the 20 cities, commuting is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. Worse, in many cities, the survey recorded significant increases, when compared with last year, in the number of respondents who said that roadway traffic has increased their levels of personal stress and anger, and negatively affected their performance at work or school.

The survey results also suggest that aggressive infrastructure investment in some of the most rapidly growing economies seems to be paying off. Compared with other cities surveyed, more commuters in Bangalore, New Delhi, Beijing and Shenzhen reported improvement in traffic conditions over the last three years.

These cities have initiated major infrastructure upgrades. For example, last year Beijing was expected to invest approximately 80 billion yuan to improve its transportation infrastructure, and Mexico City is making a significant investment of $2.5 billion over the next few years to better support the growing demands of its transportation network in one of the most populated urban areas in the world.

But simply spending money on new roads can only do so much to improve the commute. Cities need to integrate technology and intelligence into the physical transportation infrastructure, to improve capacity, enhance the traveler experience, and make transportation systems more efficient, safer and green.

One area that is ripe for exploration is how to improve parking with smart systems. Finding a parking spot in most cities is always a hassle. It turns out that in addition to wasting gas and time, trying a driver’s patience, and producing unnecessary amounts of carbon emissions, circling the block looking for a space also adds to overall traffic congestion. In fact, experts estimate that drivers in search of parking spots cause 30 percent of urban traffic congestion.

That’s where a collaboration between IBM and Streetline comes in. Together they are offering cities a Smarter Parking solution, which combines information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from Streetline’s parking sensors and applications.

The collaboration will enable cities to analyze information about parking systems in order to optimize revenue from meters, garages and other sources. It should also help cities manage large events and changes in parking availability.

Specifically, the IBM and Streetline Smarter Parking Starter Kit is a pre-integrated solution that includes instrumentation, connectivity and intelligence. The solution is designed to help cities improve parking services, optimize operations and help reduce congestion.
Ultimately, by combining the real-time data from the Streetline sensors with advanced IBM Cognos parking analytics, cities can get a better understanding of important parking factors including hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration and trends by area. This will allow them to better model and anticipate problems to reduce congestion.

Source : Smarter Technology