Smart roads
GAUTENG COMMUTERS will have noticed brightly coloured piping being laid in trenches in or at the side of roads throughout the province. Most of that belongs to the metro fibre rollouts of telecoms operators such as Neotel, Vodacom, MTN and Telkom, as well as fibre leasing company Dark Fibre Africa.
But a rather unexpected Government department is another player in the fibre optic rollout – this one along the province’s highways. The SA National Roads Agency (Sanral) is engaged in a rather visible upgrade of freeways in Gauteng, which is targeted for completion towards end-2010. As part of that project – dubbed the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project – Sanral is laying another 200km of fibre optic cabling along upgraded road sections.
The main purpose is to enable Sanral to implement a state of the art “open road” tolling system, whereby road users are billed without stopping at a tollbooth.
Project leader Alex van Niekerk says the bandwidth requirements for the system are significant but once it’s aware exactly what its requirements are it will investigate commercial opportunities with respect to spare capacity. In other words, Sanral could be a potential player in SA’s telecoms market.
Van Niekerk says Sanral has already rolled out 200km of fibre to facilitate the introduction of an intelligent transport system (ITS) – the electronic billboards along the highways – to help manage traffic flows. The new rollout, which forms part of Gauteng’s freeway upgrade project, will effectively duplicate that network, adding redundancy in addition to serving as capacity for the tolling system. He says Sanral learnt much from the implementation of the ITS and it’s now proud to be implementing such a large, state of the art open road tolling system, utilising technology to help optimise traffic flow.
Road users will be able to register with the tolling system and then have their vehicle electronically tagged. Vehicles would be identified when travelling under or over the road gantry station. Those not tagged will be identified by their number plates. Registered users would then be able to pick a prepaid or credit card payment option. Unregistered users would be given a grace period in which to identify themselves or be invoiced to the address reflected on the eNatis system.
Finweek
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