Whenever a global city hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there’s inevitably a lot of talk about ‘legacy’. Usually, this refers to the long-term use of stadia built specially for the event – but in the case of Paris, the location for the games from July to September this year, things are slightly different: a new type of traffic management will be one of the key takeaways from this summer of sport.
During the games, the left lane on the Périphérique - the famous 35km-long, dual-carriageway ring road which circles the French capital – was dedicated to certain vehicles (a requirement of the International Olympic Committee) to enable them to get around the city more easily.
Usually these lanes revert to normal use once the Olympics cavalcade has rolled through and residents are moving on to their day-to-day lives, out of the global spotlight once more. But in Paris it has now been turned into a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane - for a total cost to city authorities of more than €18 million - which will run permanently in a bid to nudge Parisians away from their single-occupancy vehicle habit and onto carpooling.
Paris, under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, has made extraordinary strides towards reducing air pollution and easing traffic congestion inside the City of Light itself; so it makes sense, now, to turn a similar spotlight on the Périphérique.
Accuracy is crucial
However, to make HOV lanes work, accuracy is crucial. Patented ‘Hovy’ technology – an AI-based high-occupancy vehicle counting system - from French company Fareco will enforce the lane for the city of Paris, explains François Leblanc, the firm’s president, director general. “We have a Lidar trigger system to detect the vehicles in a very accurate and reliable way,” he tells ITS International. “And then the system itself has two cameras on two separate masts. We take pictures with a three-quarter angle front camera; and then, simultaneously, we take pictures from the side camera. Thanks to this layout, we can have binocular vision, which means we can have a 3D vision that allows us to count the number of passengers and locate the passengers in the car.”
Fareco says Hovy accurately counts the number of people inside vehicles and reads the licence plate. Its AI has been trained by the company’s data scientists on millions of images of HOV applications, including in challenging conditions such as stop-and-go congested traffic or with vehicles travelling at very high speeds, and in all weathers.
There are 10 installations on the Périphérique, five on each side, in each direction. There are three cameras per installation, with two cameras for passenger counting and another one for automatic number plate recognition. There is no facial recognition on Fareco’s system: faces are blurred to conform with GDPR regulations.
Variable messaging signs and white diamonds alert drivers to the HOV lane, where travel is restricted to single-occupancy vehicles at certain times of the day.
The company’s involvement in this new operation does not stop at the roadside. “We are involved in the back office as well,” Leblanc explains. Fareco has developed a centralised solution that allows the collection of pictures of potential malefactors. “The city officer can use our system in order to then validate the infringement.”
Fareco says it has worked with the Institut d'Optique Graduate School, a world leader in optics and photonics based at Paris-Saclay University, to obtain the best optical performance between the camera and infrared illuminators, which are designed to provide better visibility within the vehicles themselves.
Rigorous procedure
In a rigorous tender procedure, Leblanc thinks Fareco’s technology gave the company the edge. “It was a long selection process,” he says, “with a first public tender where two companies were selected initially, and then after a year-and-a-half or so, the city issued a second public tender - open not only to the pre-selected companies, but to all companies.”
For Fareco, Paris is an excellent shop window to make the Hovy solution visible to a wider audience – in North America, for instance, as well as the rest of Europe. “We hope to deploy the technology, not only in France, but also abroad, because there are many countries where HOV lanes are already in operation,” says Leblanc. “So our ultimate goal is to export the system where there would be needs for passenger counting in general, meaning HOV lanes, or also for parking applications, where people would need to know how many people are travelling in the car.”
The Hovy system is installed in a number of locations in France today, wherever the counting of passengers is required. These include two projects on the country’s A1 motorway: a pilot deployment for Groupe Sanef; and what Fareco calls an ‘educational application’ with variable message signage for Direction Interdépartementale des Routes Nord. This is to inform drivers whether their vehicle is authorised to use the carpool lane depending on the number of occupants – rather than being used as a direct automated enforcement solution. Hovy is also being used to provide an access control and quota management service for Quillebeuf's ferry in Normandy, as well as deployments at park and ride sites and company premises.
“Our goal is to become a strong reference in passenger counting, especially for HOV or parking applications,” says Leblanc. “We plan to deploy our systems abroad, definitely.” And has there been interest from other countries since Paris? “It's picking up,” he smiles. The City of Paris may not be the only one to get a legacy from these Olympics.
