Innovative RFID Applications: Traffic Control

• November 23rd, 2006 | Tracking, Identification, Consumer Use, Applications, Government

If you live in or have driven in and around either Toronto, Canada, or Atlanta, Georgia, USA, you know how awful traffic is. In Toronto, it take can some out-of-town commuters two hours or more to get to work in the morning, and longer to get home on bad days. And that’s by car. Atlanta claims similar problems. Both are victims of booming job growth in their Metropolitan areas. I’ve driven in both places and I’m happy not to be doing it anymore.

Well, both cities could learn from South Korea. Their government is using RFID for controlling traffic, by dictating when drivers can and can’t use their cars. They are essentially using the radio frequency technology to

load balance commuters between automobiles and mass transit

which should of course reduce pollution - something Toronto has now suffered severely since the mid-80s. In Korea, cars are tagged with EPC Gen 2 RFID tags, and owners are notified which days they can enter city limits. Scanners are used to check that vehicles are complying. If a scanner reads a tag for a car that should not be presented, an infraction is recorded. Presumably, the car owner is fined.

While this an innovative use of RFID, besides some drivers screaming bloody murder about their rights, I’m not sure how well it would work in North America. I’ve also used transit in both Atlanta and Toronto. Toronto has been improving theirs for years, but anyone living outside of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) would still have a hard time if a similar process were enforced.

Because of budget cuts, the provincially-subsidized GO Trains were cut back some time ago. The average out-of-town commuter from west of Toronto may need 2.5-4 hours to get to work by train on the average day. If a train breaks down, which has happened - infrequently - it may take 6 hours or more. So many take their chances by car. Atlanta, on the other hand, has a highway “ring” around the greater metropolitan area, so outer perimeter traffic isn’t as bad. (I never drove straight into the heart of downtown Atlanta, so I don’t have first hand experience of how bad
it is.)

On the other hand, the Toronto area has the Hwy 407 ETR high-tech toll highway. Payments due are recorded in either of two ways. Commuters who purchase a transponder (presumably an RFID-enabled device) will “register” at each metal-grid archway that spans all lanes one way, and is erected every X feet, and at off-ramps. (It’s also how the OPP - Ontario Provincial Police - monitor some speeding vehicles.) The other method is camera-based visual- recognition technology, which early in the ETR’s history amounted to overpaid college students who watched
video tap of license plates and wrote them down.

There’s been talk for several years of more ETR highways in the Toronto area, so part of the infrastructure exists to possibly implement a traffic control plan similar to Korea’s, though efficient public transit from out of region isn’t available. No one could possibly adjust to an 8 hour work day and 5-7 hours of commuting or more. And the high-speed commuter train system between Windsor (other side of the river from Detroit) up through Montreal and as far as Quebec City has been the transit equivalent of vaporware. It’s been talked about since at least the early 1980s, was supposed to be complete by the mid-90s, but has been held up in legal wrangles, environmental issues, and whatever else you can think of.

So RFID-based traffic control for the Toronto area, at least for now, is highly unlikely. On the other, other hand, New York State is using solar-powered RFID interrogators to monitor traffic.