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Sunday , 24 March 2024

HIGHWAYS OF THE FUTURE: Interactive, Sustainable

Real Time Information: Integrated Tunnel Control System (ITCS)

The 9km Chenani Nashri Tunnel project, which is a passage to Srinagar, reduces the distance between Jammu and Srinagar by 30km.

The ITCS system provides status monitoring and control of all tunnel technical subsystems through a single rich graphical interface. The ITCS can be viewed in three functional levels from integration standpoint:

Road Safety

Over 80% of all road accidents are due to human error. ITNL realizes that safety outcomes will improve only when the behaviours of both the pedestrians and motorists are managed. Traditional approach to influencing behaviour is based on the assumption that enhanced awareness lead to right behaviour. Therefore, ITNL has adopted a behavioral science based approach to road safety. This approach combines extensive ethnographic research and understanding of behavioural sciences to design interventions that work at a non-conscious level, influencing drivers and pedestrians.

Design Interventions

Manage Over-Speeding: Over-speeding is common cause for accidents. This arises from the drivers’ mental model that highways are meant for high speed travel. At places where there is high cross traffic (pedestrians or vehicles), over-speeding often leads to accidents.

Here, intervention designs on the road play an important role. For instances, thick white stripes are painted across the carriageway with progressively decreasing spacing to provide visual and tactile feedback. As vehicles cross these lines, decreasing spacing gives an illusion of increasing speed. This nudges drivers to reduce speed.

Counter Over-Confidence: People over-estimate their abilities and under-estimate that of others. For instance, up to 80% of the drivers rate themselves better than average. This overconfidence leads to risky behaviour while driving. The co-passengers, on the other hand, get a better perception of the actual risk. Here, signage aimed at co-passengers draws their attention to keep tab on drivers’ fatigue, speed, etc. This promotes shared responsibility for safety.

Increase Alertness: Drivers perceive all sections of highways as similar and monotonous. Hence, drivers do not modify their driving patterns when transitioning from straight stretches of roads to features like median openings, urban transitions, junctions, etc.

Emotionally salient images create stronger responses, and repetition reinforces the emotional response.

Shape Traffic Movement: Familiarity of the road has given rise to risk compensated behaviours, like jaywalking, merging at speed without caution, etc. which are unanticipated intrusions for main carriageway drivers, thereby triggering sudden responses that are potential causes of accidents.

Behavioural Impact:

On mergers, these interventions direct main carriageway drivers away from the merge points and at crossings, funnel pedestrians to their ‘safe zones’. This provides for higher degree of separation between vehicles and between vehicle and pedestrians, thus reducing the chances of accidents.

App for Road Safety

The ‘Safe-I-Ride’ app designed by our in-house technical team completely focuses on technology-driven applications. In case of an accident, it becomes very easy for the passengers or a passer-by to immediately press the button to contact the control center, the patrol or ambulance.

The I-Ride app could be easily downloaded from the Google Play store.. There are instances when we have reached the victim with ambulance in three minutes. In case the ambulance is occupied or busy, the information is passed on to the next ambulance immediately. The call is also diverted to patrol towing truck.

“ We need to communicate that the roads are built for the benefits of the society.” Sreejith Narayanan

You are the market leader in terms of PPP. You are in non-road projects as well…

Yes, we are into car parking, metro rail in Gurgaon and recently we also won a project in Dubai. You should keep in mind that UAE does not go for a PPP model, so that is where we were the first company to get a PPP model awarded. We are constructing an automated car parking facility for the Dubai Supreme Court.

We have a subsidiary Elsamex a Spanish company specialized in micro-surfacing and it has a patent for micro-surfacing. It has significant presence in Europe, Latin America and recently we won a project in United States of America.

ITNL is the first company to have a stake in a Chinese government owned project; we own 49 percent stake in YuHe Expressway, in the state of Chongqing, China. So, we are the first Indian company to go to China in terms of road projects. Then we have been doing some work in Vietnam especially on the micro-surfacing part. In Africa, we are quite active and have an office in Kenya. Parallelly, we have offices in Singapore, Dubai, London and the US. We are exploring Australia as well. So, it makes a larger thing to say that we own almost 35,000kms lane making us the largest road developer in the world

Apart from the mobile app, IL&FS is also into safety?

We have done extensive study on behavioral science just to understand what is the user perspective – a driver or a pedestrian. As a driver, our mentality is different and when we are using a road as a pedestrian it is different. So, we try to evaluate, analyze and we felt that there are certain behavioral approaches which need to be corrected in human nature so that we could reduce a lot of accidents. We have developed number of techniques by which we noticed 50 to 60 percent reduction in accidents and that too major fatal accidents. This is one reason which helps us also to think differently on road safety rather than going with the standard prescribed rules.

The key point is or rather the key challenge is how do you communicate to the people that we are creating a road for the benefit of the society and ultimately as an end-user you are going to derive benefits. Like how faster you can access to schools or to your workplace. After we built road in states like Rajasthan, children started going to school because they have transportation system which is available for them. Similarly, in the state of Kerala, we had faced difficult situations where people were not willing to give land because it is in the urban area.

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