Porto City Hall is installing car and pedestrian traffic monitoring systems

Porto City Hall is installing car and pedestrian traffic monitoring systems to assess urban mobility in the city. These macro pilot applications correspond to pilot activities that study the evolution of transport network connected with mobility – car and pedestrian traffic – in urban and metropolitan areas.

This action is held in the framework of the Cooperative Streets (C-Streets) project, whose main objective is to build digital transport data layer that will allow to establish an Action plan based on multimodality, interoperability, data sharing and data re-usage. The key principle is to progress towards the digitalisation of transport network and to prepare roads and streets for C-ITS services.

The equipment is located in the entry and exit points of the city, with the goal of conducting a thorough collection of data regarding car traffic and pedestrian mobility for a real time measurement of the urban mobility in Porto. Some places of the city will have data collection on bicycle mobility, as well. All this data can be consulted in the Porto City Hall website, in the category Mobility.

Real time urban mobility monitoring will provide citizens with faster access to information on traffic constraints by means of message screens in the city.

The C-Streets project was first implemented in 2019, with the modernisation of the traffic management systems and with an allocated municipal investment of over 2.6 million euros. The national investment surpasses 31.4 million euros, 50 % of which are funded by the MIE -Connecting Europe Facility (CEF).

The C-Streets project follows the implementation of the C-Roads (Cooperative Roads) at national level and relies on the C-ITS (Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems). The Cooperative Streets outlining goal is to provide guidelines towards road safety, by reducing accidents and incidents; by promoting public transport while focusing on decarbonisation.

The application to this project was submitted in October 2018 and is headed by the Institute for Mobility and Ground Transports (IMTT, I.P. in its Portuguese acronym). Several public and private entities participate in this project, such as City Halls, namely Porto City Hall and other institutions as Associação Porto Digital, Transporlis, Brisa, CEiiA, Carris, EMEL, Higher Educations Institutes, Infraestruturas de Portugal, Siemens, Via Verde, just to mention a few.

The project completion is in the end of 2023 and the pilot project application should be concluded and presented sooner than six months of that date to allow the assessment of results.