THE BOROUGH’S motorists can look forward to the future – as it should see them spending less time in traffic jams and more time driving.
Council leader John Halsall said in a speech to a meeting of Wokingham Borough Council last Thursday that he intended to implement a planned real-time information system: “(We will be) rolling out of our Congestion and Intelligent Traffic Schemes”.
Cllr Halsall continued: “(These would be) coupled with a very high level of maintenance, which should keep the Borough moving while minimising environmental considerations.”
After the meeting, he told Wokingham.Today: “It’s taken two years to elaborate (from my initial idea).
“We can’t keep on building new roads, and because of the structure of the borough people will use their cars: We’re essentially 17 towns and parishes all loosely connected.”
He said that public transport would be a costly solution that wouldn’t make sense for Wokingham’s make-up, so the borough had to accept that residents would use their cars to get around.
“We have to try and move those cars more intelligently … and the technology exists to do that,” he said.
“I explained to officers I wanted a table like the Battle of Britain, but with cars.
“We now have something that’s electronic and picking up signals from sensors, lampposts, traffic signs and mobile phones.”
There is no suggestion that the borough is tapping people’s phones: the data is based on phone signal and is totally anonymised and similar to same system used for sat navs and motorising organisations to tell if a road is busy.
“With this we can identify in real time where there’s a blockage on the network, what the traffic sensitive roads are: it’s quite clever technology really.
“The idea is that the traffic signalling, coupled with the information, will react to traffic in real time.
“The signage will tell you where the congestion is, where the car parking spaces are etc.
“It will take two- to three-years to roll out, but it should increase the capacity of the network substantially and ease frustrations.”
