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The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) has issued a statement following the submission of comments regarding the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking to amend the Commission’s rules to allow for the operation of Unlicensed National Infrastructure (U-NII) Devices in the 5850-5925 MHz Band (“5.9 GHz Band”) which was set aside by the FCC for the development of connected vehicle technology.

German supplier of integrated ITS and ticketing systems for public transport is introducing a range of real time passenger information systems (RTPI), aimed at making public transport an attractive option for travellers, including: Onlineinfo provides reliable RTPI information via the internet, including Google maps, RSS-feeds for disturbance information, PC, mobile web-pages, mobile tagging, web apps and smart phone apps.

Plans for each ITS World Congress to smoothly transition into its successor took a step forward at the April 2013 ITS America Annual Meeting in April. Dr Hiroyuki Watanabe, organising committee chairman for the 2013 event in Tokyo met Jim Barbaresso, his counterpart for the 2014 follow-on in Detroit, Michigan to progress high-level cooperation. Barbaresso, vice president for ITS at engineering company HNTB and a former president of ITS Michigan, told ITS International there will be a common focus on lesson

The EasyWay project has evolved to take account of political developments at the European level. By Jason Barnes The European Union’s (EU’s) EasyWay ITS deployment project has its roots in the ambitions of former European Commission President Jacques Delors with regard to truly international networks for energy, information and for transport. Definition of what became known as the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) began back in 1994 with seven working groups. They produced an R&D and policy framework

Redflex has introduced stringent ethical and procedural requirements following an investigation into corruption in Chicago. Like the Phoenix, which also happens to be the name of the company’s home city, Redflex Traffic Systems has been reborn. Following a headline-making public relations debacle late last year, Redflex has reinvented itself, establishing a series of stringent policies and procedures to ensure ethical business conduct, while continuing to deliver the traffic safety technology and services t

It was four years ago that Volvo introduced its City Safety collision avoidance system which is designed to reduce the number and severity of low-speed accidents to the US market. However, a study in America by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) has shown that the results may not be as good as initially indicated by an earlier report. According to Volvo, statistics show that 75% of reported collisions occur at speeds of up to 30km/h (18.6mph) typically in urban traffic and in slow-moving traffic queues

Shelley Row, former Director of the US Department of Transportation’s ITS Joint Program Office, gives her views on the way forward for the industry. We, as intelligent transportation system (ITS) proponents and engineers, tend to be overly fixated on benefit-cost data. We want decisions to be made on logical grounds for which benefit-cost calculations are optimal. While benefit-cost data is necessary, it is not always sufficient. We can learn from our history where we see three broad groups of ITS deploymen

Shay Soffer, Chief Scientist with the Israel National Road Safety Authority, talks to Jason Barnes about his country’s current ITS outlook and how he sees this developing in the future. Israel ranks alongside countries such as the US and France in the road safety stakes, with an average 7.1 deaths per billion kilometres driven. But at that point the similarities end, as the country’s overriding issue is pedestrian safety. This is driven by several factors, including being a relatively small country where pe

New York City is to get additional automatic licence plate readers (ALPR) and more charging points for electric vehicles. NYPD Commissioner Raymond W Kelly announced the project to install automatic licence plate reader (ALPR) cameras in all traffic lanes on all bridges and tunnels that serve as entrances and exits to Manhattan. The NYPD already has complete coverage on the several bridges and tunnels in the city, and additional cameras will be added to cover other locations. The department has also mounted

The European Association of Operators of Toll Road Infrastructures (ASECAP) and the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA), the worldwide association for the owners and operators of toll facilities and the businesses that serve them have signed an international joint tolling declaration designed to support a wider application of tolling policies throughout Europe and North America. The joint declaration calls for an increase in advocacy and application of tolling policies to support i

According to police in Montgomery County, Maryland, the speed camera program the county started in 2009 has made roads safer and reduced speeding in a way no other tool could. “What we’ve seen is something that’s changed driver behavior like nothing else has in the history of law enforcement,” Captain Paul Starks, a police spokesperson, told County Cable Montgomery. Starks said the number of citations from speed cameras is on a steady decline, proof that the program is working and not merely a revenue strat

According to Cubic Transportation Systems, its newly-launched NextAgent is a radical new concept in transport ticketing using high-speed video links that enable passengers to interact with ticketing staff in real time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A hybrid of ticket office, call centre and ticket vending machine, NextAgent enables transit operators to respond to a number of significant trends in ticketing, including a preference from some passengers for the regular or occasional option of purchasing tic

In a contract valued at over US$141 million with Egyptian National Railways, Thales is to modernise the signalling systems on the Cairo-Alexandria corridor. The Cairo-Alexandria railway line is approximately 208 km long and is currently the busiest section of the Egyptian Railways network, carrying more than 25 million passengers per year. The turnkey contract includes design, supply, construction, phasing, commissioning and maintenance services. It covers the modernisation of the signalling as well as the

Ministers from the 54 member countries of the International Transport Forum are calling for more investment in strategic transport infrastructure and services. In a joint Declaration on Funding Transport agreed during their 2013 Summit in Leipzig, Germany, ministers stated that funding transport is a major challenge for transport policy today. The demand for mobility through high-quality transport networks and services is growing fast. They say transport infrastructure is much more than asphalt, concrete or

As part of its continuing efforts to raises safety standards in the logistics industry, the UK’s Freight Transport Association (FTA) launched what it says is the world’s first satellite navigation system incorporating an HGV Cyclist Alert system. Currently only available in London, the Pro Nav 420’s HGV Cyclist Alert warns the truck driver when approaching a section of road that has been designated by Transport for London (TfL) as a “HGV/Cyclist convergence area”, such as junctions where large numbers of HG

Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) has deployed forty-eight message signs along the Massachusetts Turnpike, Route 3 on the South Shore and the Mid-Cape highway, which will use information from Bluetooth enabled devices to display real time traffic information. The signs will operate seven days a week from 5am to 10pm and will be updated every three minutes with new information. A unique identifier and a time stamp is created when a Bluetooth enabled device, such a cell phone in a car, pass

Following the successful roll-out of Thales’s ticketing systems across Auckland, New Zealand’s train and ferry networks, the company has been selected by Auckland Transport to extend its ticketing solution to the city’s bus network. Six months into operation, the interoperable and multimodal transport smart card of Auckland’s smart card, At Hop, developed by Thales, is working successfully. At Hop went live for train commuters across forty-two stations in October 2012 and one month later was extended to in

Kapsch TrafficCom has completed a successful trial of European Electronic Toll Service (EETS) in Poland and demonstrated its capacities to a group of the key European toll providers. This demonstration is the first time that all the EETS standards, including the standards for the on-board unit (OBU), security, the system architecture and the back office, from the European Commission’s own EETS Application Guide, have been implemented in a single system and work seamlessly.

The ITS sector is one of the younger and more dynamic industries in the economy and I am lucky enough to take the helm of ITS International at a point where the industry is in one of its most interesting phases. The technology is both established enough to show proven results and yet young enough to not fully know what the end game will be. It does not have the uniformity usually seen in older industries, while at the same time the bene ts are there – even if they are not always immediately evident to poli

The UK's first open access Bio-LNG filling station, built by Gasrec , has been launched, marking the start of a nationwide investment in infrastructure seeking the ultimate prize of wiping out nearly two-thirds of the nation's heavy goods vehicle (HGV) emissions. Gasrec's ground-breaking new facility in Daventry is the first of its kind. It will lead to significant cuts in pollution and fuel costs; allow gas-powered or dual-fuel trucks to use Bio-LNG; and will operate in a similar way to a traditional petr