Ngauranga Gorge
Resource Efficiency
Newlands Overbridge
The Ngauranga ATMS has already proven to be an effective tool for managing and conserving resources. The design of the system ensures that it will return significant resource savings over the economic life of the project.
Examples of savings include:
Accident reduction
Road accidents represent a significant cost to society. The system is designed to reduce the number of accidents within the Ngauranga Gorge, and therefore the cost of accidents on society. A recent evaluation of the system indicates a 29 percent reduction in the total number of crashes in 2001 compared with the average number of crashes per year from 1996 to 2000.
Incident response
Because of the steep gradient and tight horizontal curves fo the Ngauranga Gorge, any incident can result in significant delays to road users. The quicker the Police respond to incidents the less time required to return traffic flow to normal. The Ngauranga ATMS allows early incident detection, so emergency services and maintenance crews can be dispatched almost immediately and signs can be displayed to warn motorists of the incident and suggest alternative routes. These improvements have resulted in a 20 percent reduction in response times for emergency services attending incidents in the Ngauranga Gorge and a consequent reduction in road user delays.
Traffic management
The system provides effective traffic management during incidents, improving safety for emergency services and maintenance crews, and reducing the on-site resources required to manage these incidents.
The system is modular in design for ease of expansion in the future.
The innovative software used to detect incidents and patch through video images means that system monitoring can be undertaken by one operator using one control station for the entire coverage area.
Design Integration
A key design criterion for Transit was ensuring that the system blended in with the surrounding road network. Previously, Transit had spent a significant amount of money to upgrade the Newlands Interchange and was keen to see that any ITS would not detract from the architecturally designed Newlands Overbridge. With this in mind, existing gantry structures were used to support the electronic signs, and ensure that any new structures were in keeping with general nature of the road network.
