SIEMENS

Traffic on Dölauer Street in the northern German city of Halle is typical of many cities. On weekdays an endless line of cars crawls toward the inner city during the morning rush hour. "It takes about 25 minutes to drive a distance that would normally take less than ten minutes," says Peter Kolbert, project manager for communications systems at the city's public transit operator, Havag. Back in 2005, Havag set up a park-and-ride facility to enable drivers to ride downtown on trams. Unfortunately, it wasn't very successful. "There were at most 20 cars on the lot," says Kolbert.

Since 2008, however, the lot's 85 parking spaces have been used much more. That's because an information panel was set up at the entrance to the parking lot showing how many spaces are available and when the next tram departs. The panel also informs motorists of the current traffic level on Dölauer Street. If traffic is heavy, drivers can still spontaneously decide to take the tram.

Behind this apparently simple system is sophisticated technology from Siemens. It includes two infrared sensors known as the Traffic Eye Universal, which register traffic density and report it to the city's Concert traffic management system, which was specially developed for individual transport. Concert uses the sensor data as a basis for generating information on traffic jams. Software developers faced the challenge of linking Concert to the operations control system and the special traffic management system for Havag bus and tram routes, in order for the actual departure times of the trams to also be displayed. "It marked the first time that data had been exchanged between two such systems, and the first time that communication took place via a standard public transit interface," says Lutz Koch, sales director for Transportation Systems at the Siemens Mobility Division in Leipzig.

But the effort has paid off. A recent study showed that 15 % of the drivers who are free to choose whether to go by car or tram now use the latter. Thanks to the information panel, around 550 car trips are being saved each week, which adds up to about 270,000 km per year. According to Germany's Socialdata Institute, about eight million commuters in Germany could travel to work each day using public transit instead of by car. If information panels such as the one in Halle persuade 15 % of them to actually switch to public transit, the distance traveled by car would quickly be cut by millions of kilometers a day.

Havag believes that's reason enough to take action. "We are committed to merging public transit systems with individual transport," says Kolbert. To achieve this goal, Havag will set up additional P&R lots with information panels, and also speed up the trams by modifying traffic light switching times—and possibly even using Galileo, the planned satellite navigation system. Very large numbers of people still travel by car, particularly in cities the size of Halle, which has 235,000 inhabitants. "If we can provide these people with better information, we can use relatively simple ways of motivating them to switch from driving to using public transit systems," says Kolbert.