As an Indian living in a large city I am a daily victim of traffic jams. Funnily enough in the midst of the national debate on "intolerance" someone did point out that we are actually very tolerant as we live peacefully with our roads and traffic. Also India is an impatient country. How often do we see people jumping queues and vehicles jumping lanes often even in the wrong way?
Like any large city Chennai implemented a lot of one-way routes to manage traffic. There is one such bridge/flyover in Chennai, a Y-shaped one. The leg is two-way while one is supposed to only go up one arm and only come down the other - which increases the distance. I have seen autos, two-wheelers and even heavier vehicles happily go down the up-route which used to irritate me to no end. I did see a few police personnel a few times, however the offenders were mostly free to do as they wished. The genesis for this post was this irritation.
The Delhi AAP government is also in the news about its proposed measures to curb pollution in the national capital. One question being raised is that how this would be implemented, especially given that Kejriwal has no control over the Delhi Police. The odd-and-even registration plate rule being proposed needs a big increase in the police force for it to be effectively enforced.
Given the above two scenarios I suggest the following tracking solution. As I am not very savvy electronics-wise I will not be able to go into details. I will try to address a few concerns which may be raised.
1. EVERY vehicle sold will have a certain chip/RFID tag containing certain information - owner's name, vehicle details etc. This has to be implemented by each manufacturer. Today every vehicle has a unique chassis number and engine number. However this information has to be transferred to a readable device. There should be certain designated devices only which can write information onto these chips/tags.
2. The second step would be to implement a sensor network. These sensors should be able to only read the information from the chips/tags.
3. The third is to integrate the data read in this way to a back-end network. To avoid privacy concerns users should not be able to browse through the data stored. Alternatively data access should be controlled via court warrants etc. The system should only be able to generate alerts based on certain events.
a. A stolen vehicle's registration number turns up
b. Two consecutive sensors detect a vehicle going in the wrong direction
c. The vehicle is not supposed to be on the road
4. Implementing the sensor network will definitely be expensive, especially given the number of sensors that have to be implemented. One idea is to mount these sensors onto street lights. True, there are many places which do not have street lights. However via this method the government can implement two solutions. The sensors can be powered via solar panels mounted on the light towers.
5. Obvious parameters to be covered:
a. The power consumption should be low
b. Devices should not be removable from vehicles
c. Write access to the chips/tags should be available only with designated people like vehicle manufacturers, RTOs etc.
d. Personal data will be stored in the system, so privacy safeguards should be watertight.
e. This is an obvious candidate for an IoT application. However to keep cost and power requirements low technology like RFID should also be involved.
6. This solution will obviously not work if the tag/chip is removed. So the solution should also involve measures to prevent this.
a. random checks on vehicles
b. the chip/device being able to send an alert when it is removed
I end this post here. Hope to see something like this on the roads, for that matter anything that will better our lives!
