Designing digital railway stations

Digital technologies like smartphones and RFID are transforming railways, but how quickly are stations catching on? For this feature I spoke to the University of Technology in Sydney to find out how a new project to integrate digital technology with station architecture at Sydney's Central Station is transforming ticketing, information and safety.

The number of rail passengers worldwide topped 2,600 billion in 2009 – a figure which continues to grow. But as congestion and crime increase too, in line with passenger demand, new systems to manage passenger flow, improve wayfinding, ensure revenue and improve security are more important than ever before.

At the same time digital technologies are becoming more and more widespread and devices such as smartphone technology, near field communication (NFC) and radio frequency identification (RFID) are being incorporated into our urban environment, improving the experience of rail travel.

Yet while the technology is there, it seems the integration between station architecture and digital technology is taking its time.

As congestion and crime increase too, in line with passenger demand, new systems to manage passenger flow, improve wayfinding, ensure revenue and improve security are more important than ever before.

 It explored the future of interactive and responsive urban public transport environments where new forms of communication are proposed via an overlay of urban digital media technologies. For this reason the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS) and University of Sydney carried out a research project, which is presented in its book Infostructure: A Transport Research Project.

Central Station in Sydney was used a model and the ideas have yet to be prototyped, but the concepts can be considered for any railway station structure in any country.


Go with the flow
With 77% of the world population as mobile phone subscribers and smartphones showing the strongest growth – according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) vendors shipped a 100.9 million smartphones during the fourth quarter of 2010, up 87.2% from the same quarter in 2009 – the potential to use this technology to improve payment and communication systems in transport and other industries is evident.


To reduce congestion caused by passengers purchasing tickets at Central Station, UTS Master of Architecture student Dominic Fedrigo first studied the series of actions a passenger takes in order to board a train: enter the station, purchase a ticket, get train information and walk to the platform.

To improve this he proposed a change in sequence that would be supported through the ticket purchase via a smartphone using NFC. Ticketing, information and platform entry points were placed outside the station, freeing up pedestrian circulation networks inside the station building.

Tickets, purchased online through the iphone app (60% of mobile phone users in Australia use smartphones), were colour coded to match the LED coloured lighting that illuminated the external entry points to the user's platform destination.

"What needs to be pointed out is that of course some commuters don't have that type of technology," said Dr. M. Hank Haeusler, a postdoctoral fellow at UTS who has been overseeing the Infostructure project, with Nicole Gardner from UTS and Dr Martin Tomitsch from University of Sydney, and is passionate about integrating digital technology into the built environment.

"You can't exclude more conventional systems as some user groups don't have access to smartphone technology. As a user you should be able to use whatever payment system you want and at some point one system might become more popular than the other and therefore extinguish the older one, as seen with the tokens used for public transport in New York's subway."

To read the rest of this feature please click go to Railway Technology. 

Toulouse guide for bthere! magazine

This month I have written the Toulouse guide for Brussels Airlines's bthere! magazine.

Enjoy the last of the summer sun in Toulouse this month while the city celebrates traditional Occitan culture and world-class pianists perform. Frances Cook is our city guide.


AMIDONNIERS/COMPANS CAFFARELLI
Amidonniers is  home to one of the best live music venues in Toulouse. A few minutes away you will find Compans Caffarelli, a thriving commercial area split into two by a stunning public Japanese garden (show in pic).

SLEEP Novotel Toulouse Centre Compans Caffarelli (5 Place Alfonse Jourdain,
tel. (0)5 6121 7474, novotel.com, rooms from €100) is alongside the renowned Japanese gardens.

EAT Evangelina (33 Boulevard Maréchal Leclerc, tel. (0)5 6121 3000) is a buzzy bistro-style restaurant with a large covered terrace that makes it unique in Toulouse.

LATER Le Mandala Jazz Club (23 Rue des Amidonniers) reopens on 7 September after the summer break, featuring new and time-old talent.

TIP Evangelina (see above) is putting up big TV screens so you won’t miss any of the 2011 Rugby World Cup action (10 September – 22 October).

Please click here to read a PDF version of the rest of bthere!'s September Toulouse guide.

Community Spirit - Toulouse Property Focus for French Property News

Toulouse is the capital of the Midi-Pyrénées. As the fourth largest city in France after Lyon, Marseille and Paris, this city and the nearby Tarnaise locations of Albi and Cordes-sur-Ciel can offer everything you could want in a place to call home.

To the west you'll find the spellbinding countryside of Gascony and the Atlantic, to the east the Mediterranean Sea, to the south the Pyrénées, and heading north you'll find Fronton, famous for its wine from the Négrette grape.

Flower Power
"Toulouse is one of the most pleasant places to live in France. In French we say où il fait bon vivre," says Emily Kopec, estate agent for Agence Mercure in Toulouse. The city is a mixture of cosmopolitan, contemporary, chic and cool.

Known as the pink city because of its distinctive red-brick architecture, during the Renaissance Toulouse was one of the richest cities in France due to the sale of a unique blue dye made from pastel plants, which flourished on Tarnaise soil.

The merchants were so wealthy they constructed incredibly beautiful and impressive mansions in the city, many of which are still standing today, such as the Place d'Assezat. Toulouse became the centre of this trade and a 'pastel triangle' was identified from Albi to Toulouse to Carcassonne and called the pays de cocagne (the leaves of the plant were formed into a ball, called the coques).

In downtown Toulouse itself, you will find a buzzing cafe culture, chic boutiques and Michelin-starred restaurants as well as trendy cafes that spill over onto the streets, second-hand vintage shops and even a vegetarian restaurant, La Faim des Haricots. If you want to get away at the weekends, you can jump in your car and lie on a beach, hike or ski in the Pyrénées or pop down to Spain - there's a diverse range of choices.

Flying High
Aside from the city's gastronmic attractions and heritage, it is also a world centre for aerospace. Toulouse's international airport in Blagnac is home to Airbus - which employs approximately 15,000 Spanish, German, French and British workers - and is host to the biggest space centre in Europe. It is a place where people come to work as well as visit and this also means property in Toulouse itself can be expensive.

To read the rest of this article, please read this digital version of the July issue of French Property News magazine.

Beijing's Geolocation Masterplan – The Privacy Pitfall

Beijing has announced its intention to monitor traffic via the use of the city's 17 million China Mobile subscribers. Frances Cook looks at how privacy concerns are key to unlocking the potential of geolocation as a solution to untangling one of the most traffic-snarled cities in the world.

According to an IBM study, Beijing has the worst traffic in the world. In August 2010 the city had a traffic jam that lasted for nine days and stretched for approximately 100km between Jining in Inner Mongolia and Huai'an in Hebei province (north-west of Beijing), and 95% of citizens say the traffic has adversely affected their health.

The rise of the middle class

Although Beijing has pledged to invest 331.2 billion yuan in its subway system by 2015 and 80 billion to improve its transportation infrastructure, the middle class continues to rapidly increase - there were 248,000 new cars on the road registered in the first few months of 2010 according to the Beijing municipal taxation office -forcing the government to find new ways to ease congestion.

Earlier this year the Chinese government announced plans to monitor Beijing's traffic with geolocation technology via the city's 17 million China Mobile subscribers. Li Guoguang, deputy director of social development at the Beijing Municipal Commission of Science and Technology, told the Beijing Daily that the Beijing Residents Real-time Travel Information Platform "can effectively increase citizens' travelling efficiency and ease traffic jams".

The news caused both hope and fear: the former that more was being done to combat Beijing's congestion and the latter due to concerns surrounding privacy rights. "I think, despite the excuse of traffic control, this is part of the escalation of the use of technologies to control social discontent," Wang Songlian of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network told The Guardian, going on to explain how a lot of activists have their phones tracked by the government and how it is concerned by its people's social unrest.

However, if the aggregated data from this system can free up the city's gridlocked streets, it could work all over the country - aiding its entire 1.3 billion population - due to the sheer number of China Mobile subscribers. Not long ago, according to China Daily, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that China's mobile phone users had risen by 41.39 million in the first four months of 2011 to just over 900 million, covering nearly two-thirds of the nation's residents.

Click here to read the rest of this story on Road Traffic Technology.

Food Focus: The Fukushima Aftermath

The crisis at Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactor has left much of the country's core infrastructure shaken. This special report looks at the situation facing Japan's food supply chain and how the country has been affected so far.
In May 2011, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked for nuclear reactors at the Hamaoka plant in the Tokai region to be shut down, following evidence from Japanese scientists that there was an 80% chance an earthquake would hit the area in the next 30 years. 

"If there were a major accident at the Hamaoka nuclear plant, it would have an enormous impact on the entire Japanese society," Kan told reporters in a recent televised news conference.

While there are no plans to shut down any more of Japan's 52 nuclear plants, the country is doing all it can to protect human health and prevent any potential radiation leaks from occurring in the future. The physical damage caused by the Fukushima disaster has been enormous. 

The government estimated on 23 March 2011 that the cost to buildings, roads and other infrastructure was between $180bn and $320bn. Homes, infrastructure and health have been highly affected, if not destroyed, and areas being monitored closely for contamination include forests, crops, fisheries and food safety.

To read the rest of this story go to Food Processing Technology.