The German city of Rüsselsheim am Main is developing a lidar-based smart infrastructure solution to monitor truck traffic to improve air quality.
This city will use Velodyne's smart infrastructure solution for digital monitoring and will generate reports of trucks that are banned from city streets to reduce road congestion, air pollution, and noise.
How will this new project impact air quality?
Rhine-Main is a region located in Germany's largest central metropolitan area, Rüsselsheim is an ideal transport hub with many road connections. However, this alone causes trucks to drive through the city on a daily basis, resulting in dense traffic that decreases air quality.
To address this problem, Rüsselsheim banned trucks weighing more than 7.5 tons from the city's streets unless they have a starting point or destination within the municipality.
A new initiative called DikoVers aims to digitize municipal transport systems by installing 16 lidar-based monitoring stations located on busy access roads used to enter and exit the city. This will help identify non-personalized characteristics of vehicles and their occupants on the roadways, to monitor all those trucks that are prohibited from traveling throughout the city as a traffic reduction measure.
"Velodyne believes that smart city applications, such as our Smart Infrastructure Solution, have the potential to deliver revolutionary improvements in municipal transportation systems and urban sustainability initiatives."
This new smart infrastructure project combines Velodyne's lidar sensors and Bluecity's artificial intelligence (AI) software. The idea is for the system to design a real-time 3D map of all roads and their intersections, providing accurate information about road users, including vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists.
In addition, data on whether or lighting conditions can also be collected, with 24-hour operation, while protecting the privacy of all users.
Rüsselsheim also has plans to utilize the solution's traffic monitoring and analysis capabilities in the future. These capabilities can predict, diagnose and address road safety challenges, with a view to helping municipalities and other customers make informed decisions and take corrective action.
