Roads are main arteries of modern society’s infrastructure, contributing heavily to the distribution of goods and persons. GIS provides many helpful applications for ensuring a smooth flow, by aiding design, routing, traffic control and real-time navigation.
The growth of any urban area is driven by two factors. One being, the establishment of Businesses which open up tremendous employment opportunities and secondly the large influx of people to the urban areas. This results in large number of people commuting from a large number of residential pockets, to the Central Business Districts where majority of the business establishments are located.
On an average an urban commuter spends about 2 - 3 hours every day on the roads to reach the work place, school or home where as a decade back the same distance would have been covered in about half the time as that of now. Considering the exponential growth of the number of Vehicles and the ever increasing population the situation is bound to reach alarming levels in the near future. At the same time all the Technical advancements made in various fields of Science and Technology provide effective tools to check, manage and plan the ‘Vehicular traffic’. (Mokhtarian, 2002.)
Challenges
The challenges in effective Transportation management are many. The number of Vehicles on the roads is steadily increasing where as the roads and the land available for building new roads are very limited. Managing, redirecting and decongesting the traffic within the existing roads and space are indeed a challenging task.
Methodology
Geographical Information systems (GIS) in the recent past has acquired tremendous importance in various applications. In general any application which has a spatial phenomenon can leverage the GIS technology.
By the use of GIS and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) it is possible to continuously track the location of Vehicles......
