Intelligent Driver Assistant Reduces The Time Buses Spend At Red Lights
In a project for Newcastle City Council, Zircon designed a digital assistant, comprising a data platform and human machine interface , for bus drivers to help them get through green lights, improving the overall passenger experience and making routes more fuel efficient. When challenges arose with the wider project, Zircon stepped up and proactively created solutions to keep things on track.
The Project: getting buses through green lights
Twelve tonne buses burn a lot of fuel when they accelerate away from idling at traffic lights. Newcastle City Council wanted to find out if they could use smart technology to keep buses running to time, and subsequently improve air quality within the city, by getting them through traffic lights without stopping .
Through an EU funded project – subsequently expanded by DfT investment – they set out to trial a Cooperative Intelligent Transport System concept on selected roads in and around the City.
The Solution: traffic light management + driver assistance
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems, or C-ITS, involve communication between different IT systems. In this case, the system coordinated a bus onboard unit (OBU), a roadside unit (RSU) that controls the traffic lights, and the central council IT, in order to give buses preferential green lights when they approached.
But lights have other traffic to accommodate, and can only be held for so long. Project success depended on communicating to the bus driver when and how they could adjust their driving in order to make the light.
This was a major area of project risk, since however good the technology, there was no obligation on bus drivers to use it. “You can’t just dictate what drivers have to do, because they can ignore things that are not helpful,” says Ray King, Urban Traffic Management & Control Manager at Newcastle City Council. They had to want to use it, or the whole concept would fail.
So Newcastle approached Zircon to design a digital assistant that would integrate with the wider C-ITS, and provide clear and useful information to the driver.
“We couldn’t overcomplicate things. It’s no good saying ‘lights will change in ten seconds’,
because it’s not easy to quickly calculate how you need to drive to make that.”
How Zircon Helped: developing an on-board digital assistant
Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems, or C-ITS, involve communication between different IT systems. In this case, the system coordinated a bus onboard unit (OBU), a roadside unit (RSU) that controls the traffic lights, and the central council IT, in order to give buses preferential green lights when they approached.
But lights have other traffic to accommodate, and can only be held for so long. Project success depended on communicating to the bus driver when and how they could adjust their driving in order to make the light.
This was a major area of project risk, since however good the technology, there was no obligation on bus drivers to use it. “You can’t just dictate what drivers have to do, because they can ignore things that are not helpful,” says Ray King, Urban Traffic Management & Control Manager at Newcastle City Council. They had to want to use it, or the whole concept would fail.
So Newcastle approached Zircon to design a digital assistant that would integrate with the wider C-ITS, and provide clear and useful information to the driver.
Proactively overcoming roadblocks
Ambitious projects are never simple, and this one hit challenges beyond our or Newcastle’s’ control when a problem with the OBU supplier caused serious delays.
Embracing our problem-solving philosophy, Zircon volunteered to find a new OBU supplier to get the project back on the road.
This new OBU had a different design, so we had to refine its software and communications protocols to get it to talk to the other C-ITS systems, and to enable the provision of real-time GPS data for use by the digital assistant. In addition, Zircon made enhancements to the OBUs so they could log data remotely, and allow software updates over-the-air, making changes simpler and faster.
The impact
According to an impact assessment by Newcastle University , the project showed a great deal of promise, with an estimated 11% reduction in fuel consumption along equipped routes compared to vehicles without the assistant. The results show the potential of such systems for Newcastle and other councils to be deployed on a wider scale.
Summarising Zircon’s role in the project, Ray King says: “The workshops went down really well with bus drivers. It is easy for technical projects to overlook the user experience, but here they felt they were being listened to and the design was being built around their needs, which is absolutely critical, as was iterative testing and user feedback.”
“This was a complicated public sector project with multiple parties and lots of unexpected hurdles. Zircon tenaciously stuck with us throughout, constantly adapting their approach to changing realities, and brought a problem-solving mentality to each issue, even when it was outside their core remit. This was critical to a project that aimed to deliver a whole system, not just a series of constituent parts”.
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