Transportation planning in a continuously growing metropolis is challenging. Nodeon’s solutions remove the need for a prognosticator from the equation.
Helsinki is expected to grow into a city with a population of 860,000 by 2050. By then, the population of the entire metropolitan area is expected to have risen to two million.
Although the portion of private car traffic is thought to be smaller in the future than it now is, its volume is still expected to grow slightly from the current volume by 2040.
This poses its challenges for transportation planning, particularly as space is already scarce and given that the space used for transportation will not increase, even in the future.
A compact and constantly developing urban structure requires a traffic system as efficient as possible, in which you must also be able to account for the needs of space-conserving modes of transport, such as public transport as well as pedestrians and cyclists. It is also important to understand the current traffic situation, particularly in terms of vehicular traffic.
Nodeon investigated the passing through traffic of central Helsinki in the winter of 2018, under extremely
ANALYSIS OF TRAFFIC FLOWS AS SUPPORT FOR PLANNING PROJECTS
Nodeon’s Traffic flow measurement and analysis solution was carried out in Helsinki in the winter of 2018. The collected data significantly increased the city’s understanding of the vehicular traffic in the very centre of the city and the composition of that traffic.
The origin area analysis yielded information on, among other things, the registration locations of the vehicles which passed the measuring points, right down to the areas of postal codes. The registration location helped in finding out the commuter traffic’s probable point of origin (= home) in the morning and its destination in the afternoon. The results also provided data on the emission values of the vehicle flows and on the composition of the motive powers.
Nodeon measured the traffic on the lanes heading to the very centre of the city, in addition to which the project also included extensive measurements of the passing through traffic in that area. Precise data on traffic destinations, emissions and origin areas was produced in Nodeon’s Smart City cloud environment.
The passing through traffic was also measured and analysed in the east-to-west and west-to-east directions.
Petri Blomqvist, Transport and Traffic Engineer at Streets and Traffic Planning division of the City of Helsinki:
“The automatic identification of vehicles’ registration selected as the research method for the city centre’s passing through traffic and the simultaneous traffic counting with induction counters proved to be a functional solution. At the same time, we received useful information on the vehicles’ registration locations, their categorisation and the probable originlocations of the cars in the morning traffic and destinations in the afternoon traffic.”