Revisiting Urban Traffic Control in Austria, Germany and Switzerland - Requirements for Future Developments

The objective of this paper is to establish a comprehensive overview of current and future strategies in urban traffic control, using data collected from 14 Austrian, German and Swiss cities through expert interviews, that have been conducted with representatives of the cities’ traffic control authorities. Several subject areas of traffic control are covered, with a particular focus on different modes of transportation and the spatial level of traffic control measures. Furthermore, reasons for the low popularity of commercially available network control systems in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and the city’s perception towards the potential of artificial intelligence in urban traffic control are made subject of discussion. The results show high shares of more than 65 % of all urban intersections operated in traffic-actuation in 13 cities and at least 50 % being part of a signal coordination in 11 cities. Network control systems on the other hand have often been completely stopped from operating in the past years or were not considered for implementation at all. Therefore, the results served for a synthesis of general requirements on future traffic control systems, like the extension towards a multimodal functionality, the improvement of traffic state estimation and prediction by the means of new technologies and data processing methods, as well as the inclusion of general traffic management tasks into a network control system. Furthermore, the transparency of control systems and the inclusion of a city’s historical experience with its specific traffic states are determined as valuable prerequisites for future research and development.     «

The objective of this paper is to establish a comprehensive overview of current and future strategies in urban traffic control, using data collected from 14 Austrian, German and Swiss cities through expert interviews, that have been conducted with representatives of the cities’ traffic control authorities. Several subject areas of traffic control are covered, with a particular focus on different modes of transportation and the spatial level of traffic control measures. Furthermore, reasons for t...     »