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  • ITS news
  • Conversations from the ITS World Congress 2021 #3

15 October 2021

Conversations from the ITS World Congress 2021 #3

ITS Australia

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This week we're speaking with some of our international colleagues who are attending the ITS World Congress in Hamburg, Germany. In this third episode of our podcast series, Susan Harris, ITS Australia's Chief Executive Officer talks with Michael Ganser, Vice President of Demand Management at Kapsch TrafficCom.

Susan: Well, good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Susan Harris. I'm the Chief Executive here at ITS Australia. This week, as many of you know, we've got the ITS World Congress happening in Hamburg. But of course, many Australians aren't able to make the trip to the World Congress this year, unfortunately. So we're taking the opportunity at ITS Australia to connect with a number of our friends and partners who are over in Hamburg and to bring you a bit of a sense of the World Congress and some of the things that are taking place there. So today, I'm really pleased to be talking to Michael Ganser the Vice President of Demand Management at Kapsch TrafficCom. Michael, so you're over in Hamburg, you've been there for a little while now. What's the what's the mood in Hamburg and the World Congress so far?

Michael: Well, I would say it's two things. First, I mean, you can see there's always progress. Like, if the technologies being presented, I mean, we're really taking tangible steps towards autonomy. So you can see it all over the place here. It's getting real. I mean, maybe from full production, we're still a couple of years ahead, but sort of now, it's getting serious. If you ask me for a headline, maybe that's what it is. Maybe also, of course, all the environmental aspects. We’re a major contributor, our industry, to contribute to improving environmental conditions. So maybe that's what you can see when you walk around the booths. The other is, after two and a half years, where physical meetings were not possible for the community, it's like a blockages being released, people are really looking forward. And I hear a rumour that we will see a record-high number of visitors participation. So that tells you there's this hunger and appetite in our industry to move. And that's good to see.

Susan: That's fantastic to hear, there's a great deal of energy over in Hamburg, the industry is alive and well. We certainly see that here in Australia, there's been plenty going on. It's really great to see that ongoing focus around that World Congress activity that's been a valuable gathering year on year in bringing everyone together. You touched on the environmental theme that’s coming through loud and clear. I know with COP26 just around the corner in Glasgow, there's a strong theme, and a lot of conversation around climate and how we might manage that, particularly with transport as such a significant contributor. Kapsch, I know, have been putting a lot of effort into solutions to mitigate emissions and to enhance traffic flow as well. It would be great to hear about some of the things that Kapsch particularly are working on in that space.

Michael: Thank you, I think this is the right buzz word. Allow me to step back to frame it a bit. Our industry is a major contributor to improving environmental conditions. I'm still building in my presentations to customers studies from Sydney about SCATS, the adaptive signal control that's in operation there. What the guys did is they turned it off in a simulation. They had a simulation where SCATS was running and they turned it off. The result was a mess. I mean, the cars were all over the place in Sydney, so we are lucky to have it. So this tells you it's just one of the applications—quite an old one already, I think it started 25 years in the past—now we can do now much more powerful things. And the reason for it is we have this connection into the vehicle and to the driver. And this is new, I mean since a few years. But now it's getting more serious and we see also, when you do it through the roadside unit, there's the scaling issue. But when you do it through smartphone apps, there is no scaling issue, just to tap infrastructure. All the infrastructure nowadays has central systems on top, so they already connected all the devices and you just need to tap services. Then you will connect those with intelligence and then you put all this into the cloud, reach out to car makers, clouds that are then communicating to the vehicles or you have your smartphone apps. This now unlocks use cases that bring this whole agenda of improving the capacity of roads with electronic methods to its end, to its culmination point. I see now the chance to drive the roadway to its optimum from a physics perspective. So the maximum capacity of a roadway now can be achieved. And if you want, I’ll give you very much in brief, what's the major applications are in our view. We have labelled this with three buzzwords, we call them connected, driving. That's the first part. Second is intelligent roads. And the third is intelligent, efficient, mobility solutions.

Those are the three areas that are supposed to happen. Before explaining them, I would like to elaborate a bit on experience, because you may know that in Germany, we had elections some months ago, and the Greens made quite some progress there. They are now about to install what they call a climate government. We need to really start fighting climate change seriously, it's the last decade where it can still be steered. So we need some to make use of any technology that's available to do this. And we thought to ourselves, that’s the right point in time to start talking to decision-makers. We suspected it, but now we have the proof. Decision-makers are not aware of the potential of ITS. We are in a niche in that sense. We're doing our own thing like with our customers, with the road operators, with the toll chargers, we do our thing. But there is no awareness in conversation making about how powerful it all is. This is something that has to be changed.

We believe at Kapsch, that urban areas without congestion, it can be done. Congestion is something that you can get rid of, and congestion is already attributable to 40% of all the external costs that come along with traffic. The costs of delay, the cost of environmental damage, health, and so on. You do the math, there is some exhaustive studies on this, they released a report on this every two years. The conclusion is almost 40% of the external cost of traffic is attributable to congestion. So if you get rid of congestion, you're halfway done.

Susan: I think we all want to remove congestion. But I think having those stats behind it and the mix of tools, it really can make a difference. We can hear in the background, we've got Michael in the in the Exhibition Hall in Hamburg. There's a bit of action there, which is which is great to hear a bit of that level of activity. But that mix of solutions, and the need for industry to really take the lead. Certainly, at ITS Australia, we're trying to demystify some of the role of technology to government. But there's a lot of voices trying to get through. The more that we can work with industry— I know that Kasch is heavily involved in the AIMES testbed for example—that can help to demonstrate and bring to life this technology in Australia. We've talked a bit about the role of technology and artificial intelligence to ease congestion. Is that enough? Is technology enough on its own? Or do we need other tools to push forward with sustainability and reduce emissions, do you think?

Michael: I would say that technology is of course needed, and it's the fundamental we are building on, but you need to apply it the right way. You need to do the right things. If I may criticise what the industry does, they do almost everything, but it's not really targeted in that sense. My education, I'm a physicist. I stepped into transportation science, like from the side, this was not my education. I started reading myself and then I found about how does a traffic jam work? As a physicist, you want to know how things work, you want to understand the rules. I find out it's a phenomenon where things are accumulating. It's not that the traffic jam occurs all of a sudden. So it's 6am, there's nothing. At 6:30. it's a huge queue. No, that's not how it works, it ramps up smoothly over time, step by step. When there is a signal, every signal cycle, you lose maybe one or two wheels and then they start queuing up. And when you are at 8:30, we see massive congestion, that fills up the whole road. Then you stand in front of it and it looks like you will never get rid of this, this cannot be done. But it can. You need to start earlier, you need to start before it starts. That's the whole secret of it. We need to be proactive, just we need to avoid that all. This applies to motorways too, a bottleneck congests. For this, you need to do certain things. And so first of all, you need to have a very good understanding of the traffic state. Now with all the floating-point data, combined with signal data, and sensor data, and video data, you can have a very good understanding of what's the traffic state is.

So this is kind of your first prerequisite. Here, artificial intelligence, of course, plays a role because there are a whole lot of behavioural parameters that have to be learned. There is no scientific rule set that tells you what is the acceleration behavior of a driver at a stoplight? Yeah, that's a simple psychological factor, it's difficult, it's complex. So you need to do it empirically. This is where artificial intelligence contributes. So this may be the first.

The second is, you need to take your task seriously. You must not allow a bottleneck to congest. So you need to do your utmost. Here we are in the space in which we'll be speaking traffic signals we are displacing for all this adapted. And we will show this in a major European city in the next year, you can drive this to your next step. That is a customer of ours, I can't disclose the name because it's still confidential. But in November, we will have a press conference. The customer will announce the whole program. It is a European capital. The plan is to roll out an adaptive—it is a bit more than this—to the whole city. Then let's see what happens with the congestion. So kind of that's the second task. And anybody who is an expert from the industry knows that signal management alone will not do the job. There are traffic demands that are so high that even the world's best-optimised signals will not be able to do the job, they will congest less and less. As this is a nonlinear phenomenon, the overall waiting time is going to be sort of not a lot less than without the optimisation, but there is residual congestion. So if you want to go to zero congestion, you need to start managing the vehicle, and there is mainly two use cases. I think one of them you see in AIMES in Melbourne. One is closer, you need to do closer. You need to sort of start telling the drivers what is speed they need to go. You would say well, okay then they, maybe we can save a lot of fuel. But you can do more. You can also do things like platoon compression, because usually when the vehicle starts at a signal, the platoons spread. So the first vehicles go faster, the vehicles behind, they are slower. Your platoon that was initially quite compressed sort of diverts overtime and at the next signal, you need more green time to get some pass. So you want to keep the platoons together.

So this is one thing you can do. The other is intelligent routing. There is this new routing paradigm that emerges if you combine traffic signals and by the way. If you combine infrastructure elements with navigation, there are mainly two things you can do. If you know what the signals in the network are going to do in the next ten minutes, you can pick the route that has the least travel time, we call this signal adaptive routing. It’s very powerful and saves you travel time of 10%. The other is, anti-congestion routing or some people call it collaborative routing. Today's navigators, when they detect a stretch that has spare capacity—they don't know what's the capacity, they just see that travel time is not high, but they don't know what's the link capacity—so what they do, if you are Google you have a high population, you have a penetration rate of 10-20%, you send all of your drivers to that link and then you congest it, that's not clever. If you don't look at the infrastructure from a transportation science perspective, you will not find it out how many vehicles you can send to that link, at which point in time, you need to as if you need to start sending links somewhere else? If you do this, this is another major contributor. Doing all those four things, super good. Traffic state condition knowledge. Signal optimization. Closer, compressing platoons. And doing all this intelligent routing. And most cities, maybe not in Southeast Asia, but in in Australia, in the US, in Europe, the majority of the cities congestion is gone. That's what we are convinced of at Kapsch.

Susan: Like most wicked problems, it's not just a simple solution. It's complicated, and we've got to approach it with different facets. It’s great to hear that vibrancy and to hear what we're missing out on, that you really are there with a lot going on. I'm also looking forward to an invitation to come over to that mystery city and see what's going on in Europe and see how that actually works. I'll put that on my list for down the track. So there in Germany, you've just had a recent election and you've got a new chancellor. What's the sense in Europe, in Germany? What are the big policies or the focus areas from a government perspective that you're seeing over there?

Michael: The transportation sector has fallen most short with the climate targets. All the other sectors have reduced their emissions. Transportation has not. It has even increased. So where's the most pressure for taking action? It's in transportation. I think they are doing two things. Mainly, the politics is aiming at electrification of the vehicle. I think that's where they put the most effort in. So I'm sure that we will see a policy being put up here in Europe in many of the countries where we go to no new combustion engine vehicles after 2030. I think that's when we're going to end up. But here's the challenge. A vehicle fleets population has decent inertia because—I don't know what's the numbers in Australia, but here in Germany, it's 15 years, the lifespan of a vehicle is 14.5 years—and it's expected to increase because there will be lots of people that will refuse to go to electric motor vehicles.

Susan: It’s not dissimilar in Australia. We always thought we had a long tail there, but it's not dissimilar from what you're talking about.

Michael: When you do the math—there is a whole lot of studies on this—you find out the break-even point where we have more battery electric vehicles than the combustion engine is 2035. Sometime in the future, 14 years from now. So if you want to meet the 1.5-degree goal, this is not an option. Now we’re discussing eFuels. But if you do the math on how much of them you need, you need to populate a quite decent area with solar panels in maybe in the desert or wherever, in order to produce all these eFuels. I don't know whether it's going to happen, I hope it does. You want to process traffic on roads as efficiently as possible. I think we, as an industry, have a huge offering to society where we can reduce the emissions on the roadway, I would say about 30%, maybe even more. It's material that we have just created. So when there's a deficit that is going to pile up, because you have remaining budget to the 1.5-degree target. If you break this down to the transportation sector, in particular to road transportation, you get kind of excess because we will, of course, overshoot. These examples are for Germany, but I would guess they more or less apply to other countries too. Efficient processing of vehicles can eliminate up to 40%. These are quite high numbers. For Germany, we would be at 40 million tons a year that we save of carbon emissions. And just for comparison, photovoltaics in Germany saves 35 million tons a year. So ITS could be better, more impactful, than solar energy. Of course, this is solar energy as of now. In 10 years solar energy will be a lot bigger. But as of today, ITS could do more than solar, and I think that's good news for society.

Susan: I think there's a lot of talk around the opportunity there in data and in that AI role for ITS technology to really make a difference quite quickly. Whereas a lot of these other solutions, they've got a lag and they've got an investment and it takes time. So I think while we need to recognize that the transport sector is a significant contributor, which is not a good thing. That creates an opportunity and the onus is on industry as well as our governments to look at approaches, as Kapsch has done to really make a difference. So I congratulate you and the team at Kapsch Michael, for making that a priority.

Michael: Exactly. And it's so inexpensive, you know, maybe for 10 Euros per capita a year, you will get it all. In the top 40 agglomeration areas. That’s not a lot of money and we are speaking here about efficiency factors, economic factors, of 100 to 1 or better. So, maybe the capacity of the industry would be perturbed. If all the 40 cities in Germany come, all the European vendors would be struggling a bit realizing those systems in parallel. That's a luxury problem, we will resolve it as an industry.

Susan: I’m sure everyone will respond to that demand. Part of that story is, as you said, it's helping to demystify the technology, which is our ongoing battle to realize those benefits. I just wanted to tack on as well road access pricing and congestion charging, is that part of the solution? Or can technology do it on its own? What are your thoughts around that, Michael?

Michael: Yeah, I think it's a core element of this. If you want to unlock quite huge contributions of ITS to the environment, you need congestion pricing. And not just in city centres, you need to do it in all your area of your cities. For two reasons. You want to get rid of unnecessary traffic, there's a whole lot of traffic, like me, that is really not so important. You want to reduce this, we want to lower the overall level of traffic demand, at least for road traffic. Most cities, by the way, have this, but they just don't know how to do it. You want to improve your modalities, you want to direct more individuals to public transit or to bikes or alternative transport. So this is the one major thing that you need. All these big numbers that I told you, will not materialise without congestion pricing. The second reason is induced traffic. It's a bit of a technical term from transportation science. If you are improving the conditions for cars you will end up seeing more car traffic, growth capacity creates traffic. You see cities like Los Angeles that has eight lines per direction and still has congested roads. This tells you the whole story. Traffic creates traffic. So you need to manage the level of the road access. I'm not saying that you need to ban, it's not about banning, but you have to manage any assets you have. If you have a power plant, if you have a chemical plant, wastewater plants, you have a sophisticated control system that sort of steers all of this.

Susan: So what sort of control system do we need for traffic?

Michael: I think you need this mix of capacity increasing applications like optimal infrastructure. So optimal signals, optimal bottlenecks on motorways, ramp metering… all those kinds of things. You need to perfectly place vehicles on the roads by influencing the routing patterns. And the third one you want to also manage the access to roads. This is what you do with the pricing system. It's the most efficient way to manage access. How many vehicles are at this point in time accessing my road? I as a road operator, I want to do this actively. I want this number. We do this with dynamic pricing. Static pricing is a bit outdated when it comes to this. You need to do dynamic pricing. Here artificial intelligence comes into play. It's not an easy task. It's a prediction, modelling simulation and AI task to do it in a proper way because you want these tariff settings of course to be minimal. You don't want to sort of stress your citizens as mayor. If you put a tariff on them, you want this tariff to be like a surgery knife. It must be as accurate. So you only price when it's absolutely needed, and not more. And then you will also find public acceptance because people will see “Oh, it's doing great things in my city. Driving is much better than it was in the past. And the price I have to pay is fairly limited. It's moderate”. So I would say if you are exceeding levels of more than 5 Euros a day, maximum 10 Euros a day. There's already something gone wrong, then your scheme is inefficient. That's something that people will be to be able to digest or will be happy to digest, 5 Euros a day. Of course, it has to be in balance with the salary levels.

Susan: Hence the local context. Is that the experience in Europe where there's congestion charging and other control controls being put in to manage the traffic that when it’s in place, there's a general level of acceptance? I have seen some interesting research in that space.

Michael: I think when you look at the forerunner cities in Europe, particularly like London, Stockholm, Milan, also Oslo. Those guys have done a great job because they ramped up their schemes at a time where there was no connectivity, there was no connection to the driver so they had to do it all from the roadway. For this, they did a great job. But it's time for a version two. Now you are able as a toll charger, to interact with your driver because they all have smartphone apps. At Kapsch we believe we will see the global breakthrough for congestion pricing, as soon as you go to the smartphone. It will be a mix of video tolling and smartphone tolling with dynamic tariffs. You will lower this acceptance barrier, and you will also drive a lot the efficiency. And people will love it. And all these political in-fights will vanish completely.

Susan: We've been saying for a long time that there are a lot cleverer ways for charging for access to our roads. We just haven't got around to taking advantage of them yet. So I think that's a great point to conclude on.

Michael: It’s technology making a difference. It's technology here, truly making a difference.

Susan: That's really powerful. We just need to get together and get the goodwill of everyone.

Michael: We need to find the first city. You need to find the first city that takes a stance.

Susan: We’ll keep looking. Well, thank you very much for your time. It's been wonderful talking to you and you've shared some great insights with us. We'd love to see you over here in Australia to share some of that. Maybe we can find your first city, one of our cities. Enjoy the rest of the Congress.

Michael: Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

People in this Podcast

Michael Ganser Vice President Demand Management / Kapsch TrafficCom
Susan Harris Chief Executive Officer / ITS Australia

Read more about Kapsch TrafficCom

Kapsch TrafficCom is a provider of intelligent transportation systems in the fields of tolling, traffic management, smart urban mobility, traffic safety and security, and connected vehicles. As a one-stop solutions provider, Kapsch TrafficCom offers end-to-end solutions covering the entire value creation chain of its customers, from components and design to the implementation and operation of systems. The mobility solutions supplied by Kapsch TrafficCom help make road traffic safer and more reliable, efficient, and comfortable in urban areas and on highways alike while helping to reduce pollution.

Kapsch TrafficCom is an internationally renowned provider of intelligent transportation systems thanks to the many projects it has brought to successful fruition in more than 50 countries around the globe. As part of the Kapsch Group, Kapsch TrafficCom with headquarters in Vienna, has subsidiaries and branches in more than 30 countries. It has been listed in the Prime Market of the Vienna Stock Exchange since 2007 (ticker symbol: KTCG). Kapsch TrafficCom‘s about 5,000 employees generated revenues of EUR 738 million in fiscal year 2018/19.

Kapsch

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