File photo for representation

NEW DELHI: In the next three to four months, NHAI chairman or any top official can monitor the traffic congestion at any toll plazas at the click of a mouse and can issue direction for quick action. The government’s major highway building arm has set up a command and control centre for live monitoring of traffic at every toll plaza round the clock and other updated details of projects will be displayed on giant dashboard for quick reference.

Currently, there is no system in place to monitor the traffic snarl at toll plazas until there are complaints or media reports and this gives a lot of scope for the toll operators to hide their inefficiencies in managing the plazas. Now this will be a thing of past as “non-intrusive” technology will be used to get the live feed and this can be accessed by 300 registered users or persons at a time.

Sources said NHAI has shortlisted a few technologies for Traffic Congestion Monitoring System (TCMS) after a 15-day trial and each technology solution provider was allotted 15 toll plazas to evaluate the best feasible solution. The highway authority will now award the work to one select player and the system has to be put across all the toll plazas in three months.

The giant screen at command and control centre, which NHAI chairman N N Sinha inaugurated recently, will display the traffic congestion pattern on each side of the toll plaza and indicate the queue length in metres. The system will also produce alerts at the command and control centre to highlight plazas where congestion is abnormally more. It will have inbuilt feature of automatically escalating the issue, if it’s not addressed by the officer concerned within the specified time frame.

“This will bring huge change and the traffic movement can be increased by at least 20%, once you start monitoring and the toll operators are aware that authorities are getting live feed. None of the players in the chain can interfere in the free flow of data and details. This will be complementary to the efforts to push use of FASTags,” said a source.

The monitoring mechanism will also cover locations near black spots identified by NHAI and the number of locations will be reviewed every quarter.

Officials said the IT system using inbuilt artificial intelligence would also measure the impact of traffic congestion at specified locations, due to events such as change in weather, festivals and natural calamity. It will also generate daily, weekly and monthly reports of all and individual toll plazas.

The dashboard at command and control centre will also show the data relating to toll revenue, highway helpline, road asset condition and the status of land acquisition of all projects under implementation.

