A New Level of Urban Freight Control via RFID

The municipality of Verona had the exigency to enforce the regulations for commercial vehicles for into the historic city center to reduce traffic, vehicles with permits dedicated to city logistics within certain hours often exceeded the permitted period of stay inside the congestion zone. In addition Verona had the goal to eliminate the falsification of disabled parking passes and increase the on street enforcement. The historic city center of Verona was already equipped with a congestion area system comprising of video cameras, but the ratification of the system limited the functionality of the system. It was not possible to measure time of ingress and egress nor the duration of stay of single vehicles. Once entered, it was not possible to verify if the vehicle spent more than the consented period of time inside the city leading to an increased congestion. For disabled people, the existing solution led to various problems: to access to the city center handicapped drivers or passengers had to inform the municipality up to 48 hours in advance for avoiding a fine and falsificated copies of disabled permits (CUDE) were a frequent problem. A new solution needed to cover all this aspects, while digitizing the related processes to increase efficiency and reduce the workload at the cities helpdesks.

The existing congestion area system of Verona, comprising of various tele cameras, was extended in functionality by the installation of complimentary RFID UHF sensors. With this sensors, Verona was able to measure the check-in and check-out of commercial vehicles via mandatory RFID tags. The two systems, the congestion area cameras and the RFID gates, work independently: installed at all ingress streets into the city center, the cameras contain a white list of all vehicles allowed to enter for verification via license plate recognition, while the RFID gates control the precise check-in and check-out time to control eventual overstays. The old access passes have been replaced with RFID tagged city passes, allowing the RFID gates to verify the entry of vehicles.* The blue badges in circulation were replaced as well, allowing handicapped citizens to use their pass with the vehicle of their choice, independently from any previous registration at the municipality. The possibility to connect the blue badge to a citizen instead of requiring custom permission for every entry and vehicle allowed a new level of accessibility for handicapped people.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Operation]
  Life quality of disabled people was significantly increased.

• Kiunsys helped Verona to reduce commercial traffic by 31% in the first month after installation.

• Data analytics demonstrate a daily reduction of approximately 50% of commercial vehicles within the LTZ