Geofencing for Smart Urban Mobility: Effects From a Pilot With Retrofit Equipment

Background Many Norwegian cities struggles with the negative effects from car traffic, which can introduce major challenges related to efficiency, safety and the environment. Urban environment agreements were introduced in the National transport plan of Norway 2014-2023 to ensure a more holistic policy on spatial planning and transport in city environments. These agreements between the cities and the authorities have zero growth in car traffic in urban environments as a central goal, and car tolling schemes are in these agreements effectively paired with reward schemes, as well as ordinary and special funds. Despite these efforts, car traffic is still a problematic aspect in many urban environments in Norway, and new measures and policies are desirable. In the GeoSUM, cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and geofencing are used to develop new tools for meeting these challenges. In this regard, digital zones are defined on a map, which is directly transmitted to a vehicle and communicated to the driver through a human machine interface (HMI). Geofencing technology is a prerequisite for the future transport system, for instance to make automatic driving a reality. The potential of other applications within the field of transportation is for this technology numerous; provide warnings about accidents and challenging road conditions, access control, collect payment for parking, or differentiate tolling between different road users. Gaining more knowledge on the limitations and possibilities that this technology offers is therefore important. The GeoSUM-project will pilot two different use-cases where geofencing is used: i) restricting top speed of vehicles in areas around schools and ii) differentiated road user charging in low emission zones (LEZ), where the vehicles themselves transmit relevant data, such as kilometres driven and fuel usage. An illustration of the concepts in GeoSUM is offered in In the GeoSUM pilot of LEZs, plug-in electric hybrid vehicles (PEHV) are particularly interesting since these drives can choose whether to use electricity within a LEZ or not. In addition, in Norway, PEHVs do not have to pay all one-time fees in the Norwegian charging system, and thus these cars become relatively cheaper than cars with petrol or diesel engines and is thereby become one of the best-selling vehicle types in Norway, making Norway a perfect test area for this use case. Method Through the GeoSUM pilots the authors collect information from privately own PEHV vehicles on travel patterns, speed and fuel types for 75 participants during an eight-week period. The authors focus on technical validations and behavioural change by introducing a reward scheme to the drivers of the PEHV vehicles using electricity within LEZs and warning drives visually when they were driving in school areas. The pilot was conducted in the two Norwegian cities Oslo and Trondheim, and installation was performed late September through late October. In this pilot a retrofit solution was developed and installed into the test vehicles. The equipment consisted of an external OBU (smartphone) with GPS, connected to outputs from OBD-II connected via Bluetooth, reading zones from the National Road Data Base (NVDB) in Norway, and using the display to communicate with the driver. More about the test setup can be found in Arnesen et al. (2020) Preliminary results The authors results will show how the pilot affected the drives both in terms of choosing fuels types within LEZ and speed level within the school zones. Since data was collected for two weeks in advance of the start of the test period, before and after studies have and will be conducted for both the school zones and the LEZs. The preliminary results show that the drives do indeed use more electricity within LEZ, while an effect lower speed within school zones seems more doubtful with the authors retrofit solution. In addition, to technical data, several questionnaires were conducted, indication so far, a high satisfaction rate of such a system.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Bibliography; Figures; Tables;
  • Pagination: 13p
  • Monograph Title: European Transport Conference 2020

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Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01766209
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Feb 26 2021 5:08PM