ITS on Seoul’s Urban Expressway
ITS on Seoul’s Urban Expressway
The freeway traffic management system (FTMS) of Seoul’s urban expressway was first designed by the Seoul Development Institute (currently known as Seoul Institute) in the mid-1990s, and implemented in the 18 km leg of Olympic Expressway in July 1997. After six-month operation as pilot project, the FTMS was used in earnest since February 1998.
Since then, FTMS project has been implemented and expanded in phases. In the phase 1 (from May 2000 to June 2002), the FTMS was introduced to the 40.1 km stretch of the Naebu Inner Beltway. During phase 2, the transportation management system had been established in the 21.7 km segment of the Gangbyeon Riverside Expressway and the Bukbu Northern Arterial Road during November 2001 and June 2004. In addition, segments stretching 49.3km in the Olympic Expressway and Nodeul Road & Han River Bridge also had been equipped with FTMS from October 2003 to September 2005. In Phase 3, the FTMS was installed on the 45.7 km of Dongbu Eastern Arterial Road and Gyeongbu Expressway (managed by the City of Seoul) which began in April 2005 and completed in April 2007. Phase 4 dealt with arterial roads rather than urban expressway. (refer to page 4 Relevance with Other Policies). Phase 5 is in its implementation covering 12.4 km of Gangnam Beltway. Table 1 below gives a summary of Seoul’s FTMS project.
In December 2000, Seoul developed a plan to build “Urban Expressway Traffic Control Center” and in April 2001 it established operation plan for the “Urban Expressway Traffic Control Center.”
FTMS aims to enhance the efficiency of expressways and more specific policy goals could be summarized as below:
➀ To check transportation and road situations of urban expressways, identify the cause of congestions and how to improve, and eventually promote efficiency in traffic management system.
➁ To guarantee mobility of urban expressways (maintaining travel speed of 40km/h or faster)
➂ To guarantee safety of urban expressways(zero traffic fatality)
➃ To reduce travel costs by removing the cause of irregular traffic congestion based on automatic detection of unexpected incidents and prompt responsive measures.
➄ To establish convenient and pleasant traffic environment by offering traffic information to road users and
Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG)
The decision-makers of transportation policy in that period shared the view that supply-oriented approach, which focused on expanding facilities including expanding transportation system or road construction, might no longer be effective and started seeking a new approach away from the conventional transportation policies. At that time, other countries showed keen interests in intelligent transportation system (ITS), which applied cutting-edge technology to transportation facilities. ITS was an innovative approach and very appealing to the policy makers as it helped efficient management of existing traffic facilities by enabling efficient traffic flow at much more affordable costs compared with the provision of infrastructure facilities including road construction. For that reason, increasing number of cities in other countries showed interest in adopting ITS. South Korea pursued various ITS research and development programs and pilot projects in the 1990s. In line with such a move, the City of Seoul also promoted to adopt advanced overseas ITS. In the initial period, the urban expressway FTMS started to be promoted in large scale. Urban expressway FTMS was one of the most representative ITS projects that had dramatically improved the efficiency of Seoul’s urban expressway. With the introduction of the project, urban expressway FTMS started to be established and extended.
Article 77 Implementation of Project for Establishment of Intelligent Transport Systems of the National Transport System Efficiency Act([Enforcement Date 15. Jul, 2014.] [Act No.12248, 14. Jan, 2014., Amendment by Other Act]) provides legal grounds for the project establishing urban expressway traffic control system.
Freeway Transportation Management System (FTMS)
Social Benefits
A report (SMG,2007), released by the end of 2007 when Phase 3 FTMS was completed, provided analysis on the effect of FTMS in terms of social benefits as shown in the table 4 below and the criteria evaluating benefits are specified as shown in the table 5. In other words, social benefits were evaluated in terms of reduced travel time, reduced travel time due to bypass, reduced time responding to unexpected incidents, reduced energy consumption and improvement in air quality in the section where FTMS was implemented. Table 4 shows benefits from reduced travel time accounts for more than 66%, energy reduction 13% and reduced time responding to unexpected incidents 15%.
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| SMG-8_ITS on Seoul's Urban Expressway.pdf | 499.41 KB |