The City of Helsinki has a long tradition of applying modern technologies to transportation planning. Nodeon continues this chain by modernising the traffic measurement equipment and taking the data and the analyses to a cloud.
Helsinki is the fastest growing area in Finland, even when measured in traffic. The planning of traffic systems in areas of this kind requires a sound understanding of current traffic flows and their development. This is why large-scale traffic measurements have been carried out with the help of cutting-edge technology in the city centre since the early 1980s.
Helsinki first adopted the measurement equipment of the UK-based Golden River Traffic company to support manual counts. The company’s first fully electronic traffic counter, Marksman Mk2, entered the market as early as in 1974.
While the technological advances made since then have been huge, the old has not been completely replaced by the new. This extremely precise and reliable form of traditional measurement, based on inductive loops, still has its uses.
There are, however, modern techniques with which to process the data produced by the induction loops.
Antti Muurikainen, who oversaw the project, calibrates the operation of a measuring loop in connection to the system’s deployment
THE MODERNISATION OF MEASUREMENTS
The City of Helsinki had ambitious goals in terms of developing the use of traffic data.
To begin with, the traffic data had to be conveyed in real-time, and under no circumstances was it be older than five minutes. Secondly, the possibilities for processing historical data had to be developed in a manner that made the data available, as easily as possible, to large-scale planning projects.
The third significant requirement was the capacity to combine the data of the city’s own measuring points to the traffic data derived the central government’s road network in the metropolitan area.
Finally, all this was to be made available not only for the city internally, but in the public domain, for the benefit of residents.
When you need to find the best measurement equipment for a task of this magnitude, plan the field solutions, account for the real-time requirements, integrate data from different data sources and, in addition, engage in some truly efficient data crunching, the right partner for you is Nodeon.
The system implemented for the City of Helsinki by Nodeon takes advantage of the street network’s existing induction loops. The measuring equipment gets its energy from the city’s streetlights (what is referred to as night-time electricity).
In addition, the system displays the measurement data in identical views with respect to the city’s own and the central government’s measuring points.
What was also great about the project in light history was that the selection regarding the new measurement equipment fell on the modern M680 measurement devices of Clearview Intelligence, the successor of the industry pioneer, Golden River Traffic.