Innovation against congestion.

Congestion is one of the major problems that traffic engineers and planners are asked to deal with. In the past the most commonly proposed and adopted solution to congestion was the design and construction of new roads. New urban motorways and arterials shaped the way that our cities look and operate but failed to address the problem at the longer term since there was a parameter that was never thought off. Raging induced traffic soon clogged the new arterials or the added lanes on the urban motorways. Now, scientists even say that adding traffic lanes can even reduce overall performance.

And while this effect is not always recognised by politicians who seemed to prefer planning and designing for cars and not for people, the new political shift to cutting down state debt and deficit, meant that there were no longer huge amount of money for big transport infrastructure projects. But still the desire to deal with congestion remains as drivers lose time, waiting in stand still conditions while they are trying to get to and back from work every day. And since commuter traffic has two peaks within each day, going towards the city centre every morning and away from it towards the suburbs each afternoon, using the empty lanes and the surplus capacity on the opposite direction was a sensible thing that a few transport agencies tried to explore.

 

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Greek traffic police change the direction of a lane by placing “witches hats”. This is a measure that they use on rare occasions though; usually on long weekends and big public holidays like Easter and Christmas. This mass movement is called by the Greek media “the exodus” and “the return”.  Friday afternoon, highways that connect Athens and even Thessaloniki to the rest of Greece get an extra lane on the outbound directions and this is reversed on the day that everyone returns back home at the end of the long weekend. This is quite labour intensive and that’s why it’s not considered feasible for an everyday, commuter type solution.

There is a mechanical alternative to this treatment. It’s called “zipper” or barrier transfer machine as is the correct technical term. The zipper is a customised heavy vehicle used to transfer concrete lane dividers shifting a lane to be used for the opposite direction. Back in 2001, in the I-95 highway in Richmond, USA these machines were quite large and very slow moving. 

Source: Roads to the future

In 2013 zippers got a lot smaller and a lot quicker as shown in this video from I-15 in San Diego, USA.

The concrete barriers which can weigh almost half a tonne are linked together by metal connectors and are not anchored in the ground. This requirement creates a lot of constraints and limits its application in road sections that meet such conditions. Wide medians are excluded so are concrete barriers with lighting poles between them.  

Pacific Motorway, Tanah Merah, QLD

A simpler solution is having reversible lanes without any hard separation but rather than with just variable message signs like the one shifting the middle lane in Queens Road in Melbourne.

Queens Rd, Melbourne, Victoria

Innovative, clever solutions provide value for money but in order to achieve large scale benefits, a paradigm shift is necessary. Shifting away from car traffic and towards public transport and active travel and supporting this change with not only the funding but also the ingenuity that traffic engineers and planners have proven they possess.

Motorway

Foreign names, neon lights
Changing lanes in my mind
Passing towns we don't know
Heading for the unknown
All our friends left behind
They're not even on my mind
They have lives, they have plans
They could never understand

Meet me on the motorway
Together we can make our great escape
Meet me on the motorway
Maybe we can find our perfect place
We can drive away
We can drive away
Meet me on the motorway
It's just me and you
It's just me and you

Getting late, coffee's cold
Heavy eyes, on the road
We won't stop, no we won't break
Shadows hide, overtake
The small town we left behind
We won't drown, we won't hide
A new life, a new plan
They would never understand

Meet me on the motorway
Together we can make our great escape
Meet me on the motorway
Maybe we can find our perfect place
We can drive away
We can drive away
Meet me on the motorway
It's just me and you
It's just me and you

We won't look back, so don't look back
We won't look back

Meet me on the motorway
Together we can make our great escape
Meet me on the motorway
Maybe we can find our perfect place
We can drive away
We can drive away
Meet me on the motorway
It's just me and you
It's just me and you

Little Boots, song by  Victoria Hesketh and Jim Eliot

Arrest the driver or put him to bed? Neither. Arrester beds.

I was reading the other day the news from Greece and was sad to learn about a multi-vehicle crash in one of Greece’s major highways, that resulted in 4 people losing their life and more than 30 injured. The crash involved a heavy vehicle that crashed into a line of cars temporarily stopped at road works, resulting in a huge pileup. According to one of the eye witnesses the heavy vehicle, a prime mover – semi trailer combination, crashed at the vehicles at full speed and “was throwing the cars up in the air, like paper napkins”.

Egnatia odos one of the most modern motorways in Greece, and part of the Trans-European Networks, has a relatively good safety record, especially compared to the rest of the Greek motorway and highway system that is quite notorious for the level of fatalities. The driver, a Romanian national, driving a truck registered in Romania that transited through Greece, claimed that the truck’s braking systems failed and was driving without any breaks for more than 20 kms.

Just  a few days later, another similar type of crash, involving this time a truck and dog trailer combination occurred on one of Athens’s motorways. Again in a similar situation, the truck crashed into a number of cars ahead of it, ending up on top of the median concrete barrier. The driver claimed that the truck’s brakes failed and he drove on the median on purpose, so as to avoid crashing directly on the cars.

The investigations on both accidents will finally reveal the cause of the crash. Usually in most cases like these, more than one factor contributes to the unfortunate events. Road works traffic management, vehicle maintenance and compliance enforcement, use of seat-belts and availability of passive road safety features in cars are among the parameters that are examined. 

Driver fatigue is one of the factors that have a direct link to crashes especially with heavy vehicles where drivers are behind the wheel usually for more than 12 hours per day. There are a lot of ways to understand when you are experiencing driver's fatigue and a few ways to deal with it effectively, with the best being to pull over and go to bed.

The reported heavy vehicle brake failures though, made me think of a simple road safety installation that is quite common in Australia but not in Greece: Arrester beds or runaway truck ramps as they are else known. Described by Austroads as a containment facility, it is a road safety treatment designed  for cases of brake failure. They are long trenches filled with gravel designed to stop runaway trucks by drag and fiction. Emergency stopping beds, as they are also known in Queensland, they are usually located prior to or at the start of the tight turns with small radius like the one bellow.

Arrester bed, Cunningham Highway, QLD

Arrester beds are used on downhill road sections so it's not certain that they would be suitable for either of the crashes in Greece. They do have though, a proven record of effectiveness and should be examined in all roads that carry big volumes of heavy vehicle traffic.Maybe future research can indicate whether temporary arrester beds can be used in road works situations.  

Colorado, USA, Source: LetUbeU

Investing in art: Personalised licence plates.

A few of the past posts in my blog were about the differences between Greece or Europe and Australia on transport and traffic issues. Traffic signs, tolling road infrastructure, roadside memorials and most recently World Cup logistics, my Greek origin and my Australian living allowed me to easily point out such differences. One of the first differences to spot, which I didn’t have the chance to write about, was personalised plates or vanity plates as they are also known.  Australia is one of the now many countries that allow vehicle owners to customise their license plates altering their colour, fonts, and even the numbers and letter on the plate. Greece on the other hand, allows only for standard license plates issued by the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks that nowadays follow the EU standard for licence plates.

History of Greek Plates (source)

Slogans on the bottom of the plate, is another difference between the standard plates of Greece and Australia. In Australia similar to USA every state has it’s own slogan that is used as a promotional pitch. Queensland uses the trademark Sunshine State while a few years ago the plates wrote The Smart State. 

History of QLD plates (source)

Victoria has the Stay Alert Stay Alive slogan while the previous wrote The Place to Be , On The Move and Garden State. Currently New South Wales standard plates don’t have any slogan but in the past they used The Premier State, The First State and Towards 2000. South Australia also has no slogan but they used to have the slogan The Festival State. WA used to have the slogans State of Excitement, Home of the America’s Cup and The Golden State but they abandoned all slogans during the beginning of the 90’s.

Personalised plates come in a variety of forms, colours and slogans and they can be almost fully customised. Depending on one’s preferences, those plates can cost up to $3500 for a new one that spells KYRIAKO or $500 for an Endless Summer theme. From there, the laws of  free market can skyrocket the price of a plate. 

 

   

It has been reported that the owner of the Q1 plate, that is supposedly the most sought after plate in Queensland, refused an offer of more than a million dollars for his plate. The Q8 plate was in the market a couple of years ago and the auction close at $220,000 more than 17 times the amount the owner spent to buy it, back in 1988.

Personalised plates have now become more than another way of revenue for transport authorities around the world and a means to fund road safety projects, like we do in Queensland. They have become an investment similar to buying artwork. I am just wondering why Troika and the rest of Greece’s lenders haven’t requested this “reform” from the Greek government as a way to repay debt. But then again, with so many car owners handing back their plates because they can no longer afford having a car, or at least a licensed car, maybe the calculated revenue would have been very low.

World cup team logistics. Flights and heat in Brazil part 2 and final.

The first part of this blog post, was about the Soccerroo’s choice for a base camp in Brazil and how that did not have a negative effect in the team’s performance, something that can be suggested though for Spain.  

Source

Greece participated in a football World Cup for the third time in its history. This time, people responsible for organizing the team’s logistics were more professional and prepared than they were back in 1994 in USA when Greece first participated in a world cup. For the base camp, the coach and his associates picked Aracaju the capital of Sergipe.  This was the second most northern base camp of all participating teams. Only Ghana chose to stay at a city further north, in Maceio. Aracaju a seaside Brazilian city, is known as the city with the healthiest lifestyle in the country and a national example for its bike paths. During the world cup, it was hot and very humid.

Greece played the first match against Colombia in Belo Horizonte which was quite cool compared to other Brazilian cities of the same latitude. The 852 metres elevation of Belo Horizonte keeps the city cool, suppressing high maximum air temperatures experienced in nearby cities at lower altitudes.  Colombia, not only had a great team but they are also quite accustomed to the Tierra caliente climate. Greece traveled 1243 kms (as the crow flies) to go from Aracaju to Belo Horizonte while Colombia travelled only 755 kms from their base camp in Sao Paulo. 

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Japan, that was on the same group, chose to stay in Sao Paulo, where the climate is much cooler and there is also a big Japanese community. In their second game against Greece they had to travel 2322 Kms to Natal while Greece had to travel just 605 Kms. The climate in Natal is quite warm at humid during June and July and while Greece was playing with 10 players for more than half the game, they seemed more energetic and managed to get a valuable 0-0 draw that proved to be critical for Greece to advance to the next round.   

Ivory Coast was the fourth team in the group and they chose to stay in Sao Paulo as well. That meant that along with Japan they traveled the most kms between their camp and the host cities for the group matches. Ivory Coast traveled 6670 Kms and Japan 7172 kms. That is more than twice the distance that Greece (3152 kms) or Colombia (3338 kms) had to travel. The last and crucial match for Ivory Coast against Greece was played in Fortaleza at 17:00 local time. Greece traveled 816 Kms from Aracaju while Ivory Coast traveled almost three times more (2370). While the African players were considered superior in strength and speed, Greece managed to be competitive all the way till the last minute and scored the winning goal that allowed them to go through to the stage of 16.

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My conclusion for this group was that team logistics played some role here too. Greece benefited from their base camp choice while Japan and Ivory Coast did not, in fact they probably were hindered. 

Other notable failures in this world cup were Italy and the USA team. USA traveled the most kms of all 32 teams (8886) while Italy was close with 8458 kms. 

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While I was never a fan of the German team, it’s only fair to close this blog post with their accomplishment in this last Mundial. They were the most prepared and organized team in this competition, not only from an athletic point of view but also for the team logistics. They picked a relatively north location in Bahia and arranged for a fit for purpose, newly built just for them, base camp. Campo Bahia  a new resort constructed at an area with a climate similar to those where the team’s matches were played, included 14 two-storey housing units, a training pitch, team headquarters, and a fitness center. It has been reported that a German investor has helped to fund the £25 million project. Germany was one of the top five teams with the less kms traveled (fourth with just 2114) at the Group stage. Interestingly Argentina that also made it to the World Cup final was third with just 2086 kms.

World cup team logistics. Flights and heat in Brazil part 1.

I  was writing on my last post about the world cup in Brazil and all the transport projects that were not delivered in time. It seems that in this world cup there was another transport aspect that affected the whole competition: Team logistics.

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 Brazil is a huge country, even larger than Australia. In fact it is around 10% larger than Australia with almost 10 times more population. Being closer to the Equator than Australia, it means that weather differences between Brazilian cities in the north and the country's cities to the south, are even more significant that the differences between Cairns and Adelaide.  Twelve Brazilian cities hosted world cup games, from Fortaleza and Natal up near the Equator, to Porto Alegre the southernmost Brazilian city at a latitude similar to Brisbane's. And from Manaus at the middle of the Amazon jungle again near the Equator to Salvador at the east coast at a latitude near that of Torres Strait islands. 

   

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The other critical issue with the team logistics was the fact that as most world cups due to tv coverage all 32 teams had to play each one of their three group stage matches in different stadiums, in different host city. This meant they had to adapt to different climates and weather conditions and to be able to tolerate long distance flights between their camp base and the host city they were playing each time.

So choosing the right base camp was more important this time than other similar competitions. I remember for Euro 2008 that I had the pleasure to watch Greece's stage round (although Greece didn't go that well that time), Greece played all their games in Salzburg, Austria and the other games of the group were played in Innsbruck, Austria two hours’ drive away. So let’s see if selecting the right camp played a role on the team’s performance. I will examine Australia and Greece, the winner Germany and some notable failures.

FIFA and the organisers have prepared a brochure with 83 different available locations for teams to select their base camp. There was plenty of information there, about weather conditions, distances to the host cities, available accommodation choices with the details of offered amenities and much more.

Australia chose to set camp at Vitoria and journalists in the country were quick to determine this as a big win. This was further north than what most of the teams competing in Brazil chose. Around 400 km north of Rio de Janeiro and on the Atlantic Coast, Vitoria appeared to be (and in fact it is) a quiet, beautiful city with great accommodation for the team and fairly good accommodation for the huge number of Australian fans that traveled to Brazil to attend the games. Australia was in Group B so the team had to play the first game against Chile, on June 13 at 18:00 in Cuiaba at the center of Latin America. Cuiaba is some 1075 km away from Vitoria with a total flight time between them at around 2 hours and 45 minutes. Chile had camp at Bello Horizonte, closer to Cuiaba than Vitoria and while Vitoria is usually warmer and more humid in June than Belo Horizonte is nowhere near as hot as Cuiaba. 

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 Second match for Australia was on June 18 against Netherlands in Porto Alegre and the third and unfortunate last match was in Curitiba. Porto Alegre and Curitiba, being in the south of the country had similar weather conditions much cooler than Vitoria and at least a couple of hours away. Netherlands stayed in Rio which is somewhere in the middle between Vitoria and Curitiba where Spain decided to stay. 

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Looking at the distances the four teams covered between matches, Australia covered the most at 4320 kms, almost 50% more than Chile that traveled only 2830 Kms. The match that decided the fate of this group was played in the afternoon (16:00) of June 13 between Spain and Netherlands in Salvador. Spain seemed to have big problems with the heat and humidity on the day while the Dutch seemed more prepared having their camp in the slightly warmer Rio de Janeiro. My conclusion for Group A logistics; Australia did well with their selection even having to travel the longest distances. After all, Australians are accustomed to long flights. Spain was the big losers in the logistics game. They chose a cool camp in Curitiba but that suit them well only against Australia. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. They could not recover from the shock of the heat wave in Salvador.

My next post will examine how Greece handled their logistics and what the Germans did and if that led to their success.