Day 02

Early in the morning, I went to TMU department and asked for my supervisor, Mark Walker. Unfortunately he was not there and hence, another member of TMU, Michael Daley, had a brief introduction and showed me some tools used to monitor the traffic in Auckland. He told me about the CCTV (closed circuit television) that was installed along the state highways (SH1, SH20, SH16) approximately 1km apart to observe the situation along the state highways so that if accidents occurred, they would notify the police or fire brigades at the first place to avoid having traffic congestion, especially during peak hours. Most of the CCTVs were installed along SH1. Furthermore, he showed me the SCATS system that was installed at every signal (i.e. traffic lights). I was impressed that there were a total of 600 signals to be look after. After the simple briefing by Michael, for the first half of the day, as usual, I almost fall asleep for so many times. I can feel that my mind is sleeping while I forced myself to keep my eyes wide opened. During lunchtime, Mark came into my room and introduced himself and said he’ll be back in half an hour and get me started. Less than five minutes later, my boss had a nice chat with me before handing me a plan and asked me to extract out important relevant stuff. Just when I was about to start doing that report, Mark came in and gave me a new task. I was asked to rearrange the file and then made photocopy of it and let him see. As the latter one wasn’t urgent, I started off by doing the ITS project plan first.ITS is a newly developed system called intelligent traffic system. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) describes the integrated application of advanced information, electronic, communications, and other technologies to the management and operation of surface transportation systems. It aims for modifying the present traffic infrastructure in an intelligent way to enhance traffic capacity without building more infrastructures that takes up money, time and also minimising land use. For example, the “Cats Eyes” in the centre of the road; it used to shine only when headlights of the car was shined onto it. The ITS invention was to install a solar system into it, so that during daytime, it will absorb energy from the sun and during night time, it will light up automatically to enhance the sight distance of that particular place. It is very efficient in rural places where streetlights were not sufficient or necessary. The sight distance would increase dramatically as a result would reduce the accident frequency in some danger zones. Also, road users would notice the road condition ahead especially in a abrupt bend of the road. “Cats Eyes” could be set up on the centreline of the road to show the road path. Actually, I gained a wee bit of knowledge about the department I’m working through Stephen, the manager of TMU. This department, Traffic Management Unit, a.k.a. TMU, is a special unit only available in Auckland that manages the traffic and the operation of the roads. Although the office is in Transit New Zealand but TMU works more like a link between Transit New Zealand with the local city council. This is due to the Transit New Zealand does not have the authority on local roads, they are only in-charged of the state highways, whereas the local city council is in charged on the local roads only. So, in order to achieve the best result in road operation, both parties have to work hand in hand to ensure the traffic condition reaches its ideal level. This is where TMU plays an important role. TMU has another office in Northshore that monitors all the traffic at intersections and along the state highways. In other words, they have all the screens that display the traffic condition in every place that a web cam, or CCTV is installed.I attended a GIS meeting at around 2pm until 4pm too. This was a meeting held by my supervisor with other outsiders. Apparently, I’ll be working under him on this project as well. But I have no idea what they were talking in the meeting, as my knowledge about GIS is very minimal. I would surf net and get to know more about GIS soon.