Wat zijn HOV-lanes, carpooling 
& hoe gaat alles in zijn werk?

Let's get started by explaining the term "carpooling". Some synonyms you might be familiar with: ride-sharing or lift-sharing. We talk about carpooling when car journeys are shared so that more than one person travels in the same car.

This allows you to share travel costs with other people, which of course benefits your wallet. If a significant number of people were to take part in carpooling, that would solve the problem of congestions in many places. Or just think of the increasing air pollution and general CO2 emissions. The rule remains: the fewer cars on the road, the less congestions & pollution.

Odoo • A picture with a caption
Example of an HOV-lane.

HOV-lanes

   Dankzij alle eerder opgenoemde voordelen, wordt carpooling steeds meer gepromoot door overheden over heel de wereld. Dit heeft zich geuit in het ontstaan van HOV-lanes.

HOV staat voor “High Occupance Vehicle”. Er zijn al enkele landen die het gebruik van HOV-lanes hebben ingevoerd. Het is een apart rijvak waar enkel High Occupance Vehicles mogen rijden, zoals dus bijvoorbeeld een bus, of een wagen met 3 of 4 inzittenden. 

A car often has a capacity of 4 full seats. But in the vast majority of all cars there is only 1 person, the driver. As a result, the majority of cars will not be allowed to use HOV-lanes, which means that you will often reach your destination much faster via a HOV-lane than by using the normal driving lanes (traffic jams, etc.). 

Hoe gaat dit alles in zijn werk?

You can imagine that the correct use of HOV-lanes requires some sort of control mechanism. Just look at how many people use the emergency lane during a traffic jam in order to be able to get a few metres further in the traffic jam.

Thanks to ANPR cameras, it is possible to count fairly accurately how many occupants a particular car has. To start with, we need 2 ANPR cameras that can read both the number plate on the front and the number plate on the back of the car. Of course, we also need to know how many people are actually in the car.

For this purpose, we are going to place another 2 ROV cameras between the 2 ANPR cameras (ROV = Reconaissance Occupants Véhicule). These ROV cameras are aimed at the windscreen and side windows of the car.

Deze 4 camera’s tesamen sturen alle data door naar een back-office systeem dat op zijn beurt deze data gaat omzetten in waardevolle informatie, zoals welke wagen er gebruikt maakt van de HOV-lane, welke nummerplaat gekoppeld is aan deze wagen en hoeveel inzittenden er zijn geteld. 

Men moet op voorhand aangeven met welke nummerplaat en met hoeveel inzittenden een wagen gebruik zal maken van de HOV-lane. Op deze manier kan dus perfect worden nagegaan of een bepaalde wagen al dan niet op de HOV-lane hoort. 

Gepolariseerde filter

The driver or occupants of a car are very often difficult to see on the screen, due to sunlight reflecting on the windscreen, rain, hail, ...

Fortunately, this can easily be solved by placing a polarized filter on the camera. This filter automatically removes any reflection on the glass (see example below). 


Hoe wordt een passagier gedetecteerd?

The Macq CAM 5P cameras are equipped with Artificial Intelligence. To clarify: artificial intelligence is termed artificial intelligence when an artifact displays a form of intelligence. This allows the camera to identify faces and thus count the number of occupants in a car. It is important to know that only individuals can be detected here, and not who that particular person is or what identity that person has.


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