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Amey and Kent County Council are installing additional traffic sensors on behalf of Dartford Borough Council to monitor traffic patterns that are helping make future transport decisions for the county.
The works are part of the £22.9 million Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning & Transport (ADEPT) SMART Places Live Labs programme.
Working in collaboration with Vivacity Labs, an additional 18 sensors have been installed following the successful installation of 32 insight sensors back in February 2021.
Using the anonymous smart data collected from the original set of sensors installed in February, transport planners at KCC have been able to understand how road users interact with transport infrastructure and each other. The combination of real-time data and predictive algorithms is enabling the highways authority to identify areas for road layout or infrastructure improvements and ultimately design a better road user experience. Transport planners have also used near-miss analysis between vehicles vs vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists to understand those conflicts, near misses and incidents, along with the traffic conditions that preceded them, which is enabling planners to design-out inherent road layout risks.
Kent County Council Cabinet Member for Highways and Transport, David Brazier, said: "This innovative technology will enable us as a council to have definitive data at our fingertips.
"As well as helping to make safer communities, these sensors will play their part in delivering our strategic aim of having no deaths on our county’s roads by 2050."
The latest sensors are again being installed in Dartford which will be able to count and classify what modes of transport are using the highways at any given time, as well as monitoring the usage and speeds of cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians. This stage of the project is being funded by Dartford Borough Council and is to provide insight into the traffic patterns around the Town Centre improvements planned for next year. Traffic patterns will be monitored before, during and after to provide insight into the improvement works.
