News

German company Vitronic has been selected by Thales Group to supply key components for all fixed enforcement gantries for the nationwide truck charging system to be implemented on 15,000km of French roads. The multi-million euro contract is part of the prestigious Ecotaxe project, a distance based charge for trucks. From mid-2013 onwards, all vehicles over 3.5 tons in weight will have to pay a tax on national roads with the fee being collected by means of an onboard GPS satellite system. Vitronic has been s

The Co-operative Insurance company in the UK says that new data shows that the introduction of telematics technology is leading to better driving behaviour from Britain's young road users. Intelligence gathered from the company’s 'smartbox' scheme shows that 35% are consistently showing 'excellent' driving while less than 5% demonstrate 'poor' driving habits. The Young Driver scheme, launched just over a year ago, measures driving behaviours including speed, braking and cornering. It then scores these from

Telvent GIT has been awarded a contract by Almabani General Contractors to implement the SmartMobility Road Suite solution on the extension of roads in Arriyadh Old Airport area. The project, led by the High Commission for the Development of Arriyadh, will extend the existing north-south and east-west highways for more than 11km including construction of three tunnels. Telvent’s SmartMobility Road Suite, based on the company’s control and data acquisition system (OASyS SCADA), will allow centralisation of

A two-year study, ‘Speed cameras in an urban setting: a cost-benefit analysis’, which has been published online in ‘Injury Prevention’ claims that the deployment of speed cameras in urban areas saves vast amounts of money as well as lives. The authors (Joan Mendivil, Anna García-Altés, Katherine Pérez, Marc Marí-Dell'Olmo, and Aurelio Tobías) base their findings on the impact of speed cameras, which were first deployed on the major access routes in and out of Spanish city Barcelona in 2003.

The Mineta Transportation Institute has released a peer-reviewed research report, An Economic and Life Cycle Analysis of Regional Land Use and Transportation Plans. This study is the third in a series that applies a new form of spatial economic model to examine the economic effects, the distribution of those effects, and their implications for California's Assembly Bill (AB) 32 and Senate Bill (SB) 375 implementation. These bills are intended to significantly reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) and urban sprawl b

The European Commission's (EC's) second Marco Polo funding programme for projects which shift freight transport from the road to sea, rail and inland waterways, has launched a call for proposals to reduce road congestion and also the impact of freight transportation upon the environment. The call for proposals is worth US$82 million. Companies who are able to transfer their freight from the roads, and use alternative transportation methods such as by sea, rail and inland waterways will receive grants under

PIPS Technology has supplied and installed two Journey Time Measurement Systems (JTMS) in Gravesend and Tunbridge Wells for Kent Highway Services (KHS) in the UK. There are 21 different camera sites featuring a total of 34 PIPS P372 integrated Spike Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras spread across the two individual project locations, all of which are on single-lane carriageways. The cameras, linked via wireless communications to the JTMS software, read the number plate of every vehicle that

Meier Express, with headquarters in Bern, Switzerland, has opted for SmarTour from PTV for managing its fleet of vehicles. The transport company, which offers logistical transport services all over Europe, uses this high-end planning software to visualise complex transport processes, enable cooperative planning within the team of schedulers and joint scheduling of different types of transport in one single system.

A free public meeting and webinar to provide an update on the Connected Vehicle Safety and Policy Programme is being organised by the US DoT’s ITS Joint Program Office (ITS JPO). It will provide an overview of the entire research programme, including vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), safety pilot, safety policy, and human factors. There will also be a session on commercial vehicles designed to solicit input on US DoT's research plans for related commercial vehicle applications for s

Parking technology specialist APT SkiData has won a significant new contract with Edinburgh Airport to replace the existing car parking technology infrastructure to manage and control the parking of more than 4,500 vehicles. The new system will make maximum use of the latest automatic number plate recognition and RFID technologies for speed and ease of access for visitors without sacrificing control.

A Technology Partnerships study has been announced to evaluate the safety benefits of a solar-powered traffic signage system designed to minimise crashes on horizontal curves in the US. Part of the US FHWA Highways for Life initiative, evaluations will test the effectiveness of innovative road infrastructure safety technologies that are fully developed and market ready, but have had little use on US roads. Although horizontal curves make up a small percentage of total road miles, they account for 25 per cen