Hate commuting? It's RFID to the rescue

A traffic system from IBM has reduced Stockholm rush-hour congestion by 25 per cent in a month, and Big Blue says it wants to take it to cities around the world.

After only one month, the peak-hour traffic was reduced by 25 per cent, or 100,000 cars. At the same time, 40,000 more people used public transportation.

"We are already seeing such good results that I think this will convince other cities to take a look at this," said Peggy Kennelly, vice president of IBM On Demand Innovation Services. According to her, the results were made possible by new technology making the system highly automatic.

The system revolves around a concept that would be political suicide in many parts of the world. Under the programme, Stockholm charged drivers to be on the road, and payment was made through RFID tags. Still, large metropolitan areas in other parts of the globe are increasingly looking at ways to clamp down on congestion and pollution, either by charging fees or through restrictive regulations. In New Delhi, for instance, diesel buses are prohibited.

These systems could also be used to automate payments on toll roads in Massachusetts, Portugal and other places. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC, are already discussing congestion pricing solutions to their traffic problems.

In Stockholm, car owners were encouraged to glue an RFID (radio frequency identification) transponder onto the inside of the windscreen. While entering or leaving the city, electronic register stations along the road pick up radio signals from the transponder, and a central computer system charges a car owner's bank account.

Cars that lack the RFID tag are photographed by cameras along the road. The licence plate is translated by an optical character recognition system into numbers and letters, and is compared to the national driver's licence database. The driver can then pay the fee, either through the Internet or in a convenience store, much like London's congestion charge.

If identification fails, the photo is analysed again by sophisticated algorithms that mimic the human way of understanding images. They find the optimal viewing angle and search for predefined patterns of symbols.

"It allows a very high rate of recognition, and so a very high rate of automation. It allows people to drive through without adding long lines to a toll booth," Kennelly said, "The city is also able to charge the tolls at specific times of the day, when you want to manage the traffic flow."

Stockholm drivers are charged from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The fee varies, coming to a high during peak traffic hours. After the seven-month trial, the city will vote on whether to keep the system.

"From an international perspective, it is important to not only have economic growth, but environmental growth," Stockholm Mayor Annika Billstrom said. "Many cities have serious environmental issues. We are now doing this trial with a modern, exciting, new system, which the rest of Europe and the world can learn from.”

The human factor might be harder to work on: not everyone is willing to let go of the wheel, Kennelly said. "This requires a culture change; it requires people to understand the benefits, and it requires a mass-transit system to implement this. But the technology is ready for it," she said.

The human factor is a concept being bandied about more at IBM these days. In conjunction with its push into services, IBM is beginning to conduct more research into human behaviour and social sciences. The hope is that IBM can better understand how large organisations function and apply technology to make them more efficient.

If it sounds odd that IBM is getting into what many in academia call 'soft' sciences, you're not the first to think that. But IBM says new fields tend to seem flimsy.

"A long time ago, people didn't think there was science in computer science. If you were a member of the IBM Academy, you were in hardware. There was no deep intellectual depth in software," Paul Horn, senior vice president of research at IBM, said in an interview last year. "Now people say the same thing about services."