Features

David Crawford investigates progress in a key safety area - work zones. Highway construction zone safety is taken seriously enough in the US to merit a special spring National Work Zone Awareness Week, which in 2010 ran from 19-23 April. Headed by the US Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), this aims to reduce an annual toll of work zone deaths - 720 in 2008 (an average of one every 10 hours) with more than 40,000 traffic injuries (an average of one every 13 minutes).

In 2004, Finland extended its automatic speed enforcement from 280 to 800 road kilometres. Risto Öörni of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, explains the costs and the benefits. Automatic speed enforcement in Finland is operated by the police and is based on cameras installed on poles along main roads and mobile semi-automatic speed enforcement units installed in police cars.

What do recent vehicle recalls mean for future cooperative infrastructures? Anthony Smith takes a look. As ITS industry stakeholders converge on Amsterdam for the 2010 Cooperative Mobility Showcase, an unprecedentedly wide range of technologies will be on display demonstrating what might be achievable in the future from innovations based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications.

Rudolf Mietzner looks at how machine-to-machine technologies and applications will affect the automotive sector in the coming years

By May this year, the new Gateway Bridge in Brisbane, which is being built alongside an existing bridge, will be open. With it will come an end-to-end free-flow tolling system. Interview with Sue Caelers, Queensland Motorway Ltd. Queensland Motorways Ltd owns and operates 61km of roadway in the area around Brisbane, Australia. This includes the Gateway Bridge and the Gateway Extension, Logan and Port of Brisbane motorways.

Mark Cartwright, Centaur Consulting, discusses developments in urban traffic management and control. Despite the concept of UTMC (Urban Traffic Management and Control) having been around for some years now, there remains a significant rump of confusion as to its relationship with its similar-sounding cousin UTC (Urban Traffic Control). To many people, the two are one and the same. However, this is not the case.

Theoretical balance Kallistratos Dionelis, secretary general of ASECAP, comments on the European Commission's new ICT Standardisation Work Programme. I've just read a proposal from the European Commission on the 2010-2013 ICT Standardisation Work Programme. As ASECAP Secretary General this is one of my responsibilities. I work to receive information, to disseminate information and to build bridges and mutual understanding between policy-makers and the industrial world, between ASECAP and others.

Unbroken service Technolution's Winifred Roggekamp and Dave Marples describe efforts to upgrade the Westerscheldetunnel's tolling system to give free-flow capability. Until 2003 the Flanders region of Zeeland, in the south-west of the Netherlands, was connected to the mainland only by ferry. The new Westerscheldetunnel, a 6.6km toll tunnel, improves communications with the region considerably, taking some 100km off the alternative road journey. In 2006 it was recognised that the toll plaza for the tunnel ne