New traffic management system tested on Homecoming crowd

Drivers in Champaign-Urbana may have noticed something unusual last Saturday: more than 100 University of Illinois students stationed on street corners throughout the city, counting cars and recording their movement on smart phones.

The students were helping transportation researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) test an innovative new system that monitors traffic congestion and can provide valuable, real-time information to police, emergency personnel and the public with the goal of helping traffic flow more smoothly during major events.

Using their cell phones and a specially designed application, the students documented traffic surrounding the Illinois-Indiana football game. It is the most massive deployment to date of the system researchers call "TrafficTurk," which promises to revolutionize traffic monitoring during extreme congestion events, says CEE Assistant Professor Dan Work, who is leading the project.

“For three hours on Saturday morning, our team turned the streets of Champaign-Urbana into one of the most densely instrumented cities in the country,” Work said. “The project demonstrated that it is possible to instantly deploy a temporary traffic sensor system to provide an extremely high resolution view of real-time traffic conditions.”

For decades traffic engineers have relied on manual data collection on surface streets, usingtools called turning movement counters. The devices are expensive, though, and municipalities could never afford to give them to hundreds of people at once for real-time monitoring, Work said. TrafficTurk employs an application that essentially turns a smart phone into a turning movement counter. The application can be downloaded from a website and utilized by as many people as necessary, depending on the size of the event. The information recorded can bemade immediately available.

“Anybody with a phone can do it—the hardware cost is now removed,” Work added. “You still need to pay people to collect data, but you can collect it at every intersection simultaneously, and it can be used to generate state-of-the art traffic analytics to enable better real-time traffic management.”

The system’s name was inspired by a chess-playing machine from the 18^th century called the "Mechanical Turk," which was secretly controlled by a world-class chess expert hidden inside. As with that machine, Work explained, the secret to TrafficTurk’s success is the people who operate it.

“For event-driven congestion, TrafficTurk incentivizes users to collect data at scales which are not possible using today’s technology,” he said.

Approximately 140 students participated in the Homecoming data gathering. Most were stationed on street corners in and around the campus area, with the densest concentration of them on Lincoln Avenue, Neil Street, St. Mary’s Road and Green Street from the hours of 8 a.m.-11 a.m. An additional 20 students and researchers supported operations at Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory.

"The experiment was a huge success, and our volunteers did an amazing job staying warm and providing a steady steam of data for us to view," Work said. "We are thrilled about the new research and practical applications TrafficTurk will enable."

Work’s hope is to deploy the system with ever-bigger events—for example the Chicago Marathon.

“Eventually I’d like to see event-driven traffic congestion monitored and managed efficiently, anywhere in the world,” he said.

Editor's note: (Nov. 1, 2012) -- Following the destruction of Hurricane Sandy, Work is taking a team to deploy TrafficTurk in Manhattan to learn about how major disasters affect traffic patterns and how traffic systems recover from them. In addition to hiring NYU students to use the app in a coordinated effort the way the U of I students did in Champaign-Urbana, the team is asking the general public to download the app and use it for 15 minutes—anytime they want, not all at the same time—anywhere in Manhattan. The app now contains training instructions inside it, so anyone can use it.  They will also collect the data from these volunteers and analyze it.
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Contact: Dan Work, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 510/499-8169 (cell, primary), 217/333-3487.

Writer: Celeste Arbogast Bragorgos, director of communications, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 217/333-6955.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.