Some things to look forward to that'll improve road safety for everybody!
Vision of the future
The introduction of a panoramic camera and technological developments may soon greatly improve freeway incident detection. A panoramic CCTV camera uses multiple image sensors and stiches the videos together to make a 360° video. This is done by analysing the edges of the videos and looking for similarities, using two adjacent cameras, and stitching them together where they overlap. Doing this with all four built-in cameras, the resulting video is 360°. This technology would give the Freeway Management System (FMS) operator
an immersive view of the site/area. SANRAL’s Technical Innovation Hub is piloting the system at the N2/ R300 Swartklip Interchange, in the Cape Town Metropole, which is notorious for high rates of incidents.
With this increased visibility, the operators may monitor the whole area from a bird’s-eye view, providing vital and real-time information to emergency personnel on-scene.
Operators will then also be able to proactively predict potential secondary incidents that may impact traffic flow negatively.
Engineering grade surveys can be conducted using drones, properly known as remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS Photogrammetry). This allows the accurate, comprehensive capture of geospatial, topographical and engineering survey data along roads and helps to enhance the construction of safer roads.
Drones are also well suited for use in the management of incidents that
have an impact on roads such as fires, floods and earthquakes. They can assist in the detection, intervention and post-incident monitoring of these incidents.
They are also useful in monitoring traffic trends such as the level of service, intersection operations, origindestination flows and real-time traffic data. They can be equipped with all kinds of sensors and equipment such as chemical sensors and infrared cameras.
Reflective road studs, or cat’s eyes as they are often referred to, have been used on South Africa’s roads for more than 40 years to improve visibility and provide guidance to motorists travelling at night. The problem is that they rely on a car’s headlights for illumination. Thus, they only assist a driver when they are properly illuminated by the vehicle’s headlights. Light Emitting Diodes (LED) road studs, on the other hand, use stored energy to illuminate themselves when visibility is low, and provide
guidance on the roadway to motorists of up to 1 000m.
LED road studs make use of small solar (photovoltaic) panels to charge during the day. When the light on the panels are reduced at night, during mist or heavy rain, the road studs will turn on. They require no special timers, as they react to the lighting and visibility conditions in their immediate location. The use of LED road studs greatly improves a driver’s reaction time to potential hazards or sudden changes in road alignment.
