Cities are constantly in motion. New housing developments, new and redesigned streets, and growing logistics flows all require innovative solutions to keep the city traffic-safe, liveable, and sustainable. The Local Traffic Monitor, developed by Antea Group together with the municipalities of Rotterdam and The Hague and the Topsector Logistics, offers precisely that: an objective instrument that provides insight into traffic flows down to street level and thus forms a solid basis for well-substantiated decisions.
The Local Traffic Monitor by Antea Group
Jos Streng works in the Mobility Department of the Urban Development cluster of the Municipality of Rotterdam, where he focuses primarily on freight transport and urban logistics policy. He pays particular attention to making optimal use of modelling tools to analyse and evaluate policy. Through a professional exchange with his counterpart at the Municipality of The Hague, he became acquainted with Antea Group’s Local Traffic Monitor.
“The Hague was working with Antea Group because the Mobility Department is required to supply traffic data for the Environment and Planning Act. For this purpose, Antea Group developed an automated solution based on traffic model data: the Local Traffic Monitor.”
Specifically for freight transport
Streng then wondered whether the Local Traffic Monitor could also be explicitly used for freight transport and urban logistics. “For this, we had developed a simulation model together with TU Delft, the so-called tactical freight simulator. What appealed to us about the Local Traffic Monitor was that, in addition to the simulation model, it can intelligently disaggregate traffic model results. We wanted to apply this approach to freight transport and urban logistics as well, to obtain a street-level picture of freight traffic volumes per day.”
Renewed version of the Local Traffic Monitor
Subsequently, the municipalities of Rotterdam and The Hague, Antea Group, and the Topsector Logistics jointly developed an updated version of the Local Traffic Monitor. In this version, in addition to freight transport and urban logistics, explicit attention was given to the potential nuisance caused by construction traffic. Streng explains: “All major cities face a housing construction challenge. This means densification in an already busy urban core. Insight into existing traffic pressure and the expected increase due to construction traffic is therefore highly relevant.”
Rutger Verschelling is a traffic consultant at engineering and consultancy firm Antea Group. There, he develops smart combinations of data sources and models to answer questions across different mobility domains. This approach also considers related issues such as the environment, noise, nitrogen emissions, and spatial development.
“For the original Local Traffic Monitor, we already used a wide range of data sources. In the updated version, we added several more, including the Municipality of Rotterdam’s tactical freight simulator. This simulator was also linked to the regional traffic model of the Rotterdam–The Hague Metropolitan Region, which both municipalities were already using before the introduction of the Local Traffic Monitor. In addition, the renewed version incorporates supplementary public data sources from earlier studies by the Topsector Logistics and TNO.”
Source: Antea Group
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