The Netherlands now has an ambitious project that relies on hundreds of smart traffic signals to identify oncoming vehicles, which helps ambulances reach their destinations safely and quickly, and provides truck drivers with suggestions for less congested routes to help reduce pollution.
The transportation platform there allows Dutch drivers to communicate with their surroundings via the internet using their mobile phones or updated dashboard navigation systems. Dutch authorities stated that the system reached over one million users in 2018 and increased to 2.5 million users in 2020. Recently, a city data access platform went live in January, providing a central repository where all information about smart mobility can be received and sent.
UDAP provides connectivity with traffic lights to prioritize emergency services, but public buses and cyclists can also be given priority at certain intersections. Traffic lights can also be used to optimize traffic flow.
A recent initiative also calls for adding 1,000 traffic signals to the existing 800 smart signals, at a cost of 20 million euros, to be shared by cities, provinces, and the federal government.
According to estimates in 2018, up to 3,000 traffic lights will be made smart in the coming years.
A primary goal of increasing the number of lights is to reduce collisions caused by emergency vehicles being forced to run red lights on their way to the scene. There were 165 such incidents in 2018 and 2019. According to Vincent Habers, a senior consultant at TalkingTraffic, a full report evaluating SuccessTalkingTraffic is expected to be released in June, although comments from emergency vehicle drivers suggest the system has made a “huge difference.”
He said the system helps increase the speed at which emergency drivers can cross intersections, meaning they are no longer forced to run red lights, which can prevent legal obstacles.
The Netherlands’ nationwide intelligent transportation system generates massive amounts of data that must flow almost instantly from traffic signals and loop sensors every few miles along every lane.
To create a service center to collect traffic information, Dutch telecommunications giant KPN and the Dutch government began collaborating with Klarrio, a company specializing in real-time streaming, data analytics, and processing with a US office in North Carolina, in 2016. The collaboration created a streaming, cloud-native platform for real-time data processing, with the initial goal of reducing traffic congestion on busy routes by 20% and travel time by 10%.
This hub can manage communication between more than 5,000 traffic lights and 2 million vehicles, as well as 50,000 loop sensors, parking meters, and public transportation. According to the Klarrio website, all the different groups using the hub manage their own applications within the hub, which operates securely with a latency of less than 200 milliseconds.
Jim Smith, co-founder of Klarrio, said the system in the Netherlands can even track whether a bridge on many canals across the country is functioning properly. During a fireside chat at an IoT technology summit, Smith stated that Klarrio's main challenge is ingesting massive amounts of data and then understanding that data in a timely manner.
A system with 1,000 sensors is very small. He said, "This is a complex system with millions or 500,000 devices." Klarrio hired a data science team to handle the system that generated 1 PB of data in 6 months, equivalent to 11,000 4K movies that would take 2.5 years to watch.
The Netherlands' intelligent transportation system is not unique, although nationwide deployment of such systems is extremely rare. These systems are deployed in urban areas of many US cities, areas that are typically not connected to nearby suburbs, counties, or states.
For example, Carlsbad, near San Diego, California, has deployed a parking and traffic management system with artificial intelligence that adapts to changing ground conditions. "Transportation management has already started working and is moving towards greater mobility," he said at the same IoT summit. "This is an area that is making a difference in the trend of smart cities."
