Features

Richard Harris from Xerox considers how to alleviate inner-city traffic congestion. Whether travelling for business or leisure, wasting unnecessary time during your journey is a common source of frustration. From dealing with congestion, hold-ups caused by broken down vehicles or crashes to roadworks and other types of delay, wasting time is almost guaranteed to make most people experience additional stress before they even get to where they want to go.

Andrew Bardin Williams looks at state-run schemes to encourage green transportation habits with raffles, gift cards, competitions and frequent traveller points. The societal benefits of green transportation are obvious: less congestion, cleaner air and healthy economy. Equally the advantages for individuals are pretty clear too: a healthy lifestyle, freedom of movement and the feeling of being a part of something greater than oneself.

Brazil’s incident-prone Regis Bittencourt Highway was once known as ‘the highway of death’ but investment in ITS systems has brought about some big improvements, as Mauro Nogarin discovers Between 2010 and the end of 2014, Brazil made major investments in traffic technology across its national highways with the result that the ITS network went from 4,963km of fibre optics to 8,524km and the number of cameras increased from 1,127 to 3,208.

Vaisala’s Dr Kevin Petty explains why the weather will continue to play a big part in road safety and traffic management in the smart cities of the future. The world is becoming increasingly connected. Thanks to advances in information and communications technology, the cities we live in are becoming ‘smart’, with everything from education to law enforcement managed by integrated tech solutions in a bid to improve quality of life.

ITS Germany used its presence at the June 2016 Europe ITS Congress in Glasgow to make two major announcements from the city of Hamburg, country’s second-largest urban area. First came a formal bid to host the 2021 ITS World Congress; second, the global unveiling of new Roadwork Administration and Decision System (ROADS) software.ROADS has emerged to enable coordination of planned transport construction projects several years before start dates, to minimise impacts on traffic flows when work begins.

Having authored HERMES, a major study for the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communication, Josef Czako talks to ITS International about his findings and lessons for other authorities. When CEOs of major automakers are predicting more change in the next five years than in the past 50, what is the role of national authorities considering the benefits of innovations in ITS?