siliconindia | | July 20198IN MY OPINIONI f we sent up a drone camera to take pictures of In-dian roads during peak traffic, it would resemble a mass of unmoving metal with bumper-to-bumper traffic gridlocking every major road. The situation is so bad and turning worse each day that people point out Bangalore's most infamous logjam at Silk Board Junction which has inspired its own Twitter paro-dy account as `India's largest parking lot'. Traffic snarl-ups not only causes frustrations to millions of passengers, the estimated financial cost is over $2000 billion per year worldwide.But it's not Bangalore, Mumbai or New Delhi that takes the crown for the most gridlocked city in the world; By Amitabh Ray, Managing Director, EricssonAmitabh holds 28 years of vast experience in working on global assignments in corporate strategy, management consulting, program & engagement management, and many others.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & 5G TO EASE GLOBAL TRAFFIC WOES WITH INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEMSit's Los Angles. The Global Traffic Scorecard, from INRIX, a transportation analytics company, found that LA drivers spend an average of 102 peak hours in con-gestion ­ 11 hours longer than the next most congested cities, New York and Moscow. Sao Paulo's drivers sit in fourth place, with 86 hours spent in traffic, while San Francisco ranks fifth with 83 hours. Out of the 1,360 cities analyzed, London was seventh, behind Bogota who had 75 peak hours of congestion. On average in the UK, drivers spend an average of 31 hours a year in traffic which in 2017 led to a loss of more than £37.7 billion in related costs. The easiest solution we often think is to spend mon-ey on infrastructure, but that's not a silver bullet. The solution lies in a combination of measures from remote working, to spreading the business districts, ride shar-ing, road user pricing and of course Intelligent Trans-port Solutions (ITS) such as dynamic traffic lights, the wider use of all lane running on motorways and the ef-ficient planning of road works.The best starting point to implement an ITS is with collecting data and running algorithms with it to find out the source of the current problem and forecasting what will happen next. If we know what can be the possible areas of bottlenecks in the next few hours, the traffic management system can be pressed into action to avoid the gridlocks. Longer range forecasting will help policymakers and transportation professionals to know when and where congestion is worst, to prioritize investments
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