Search

During a one week trial, Tussam, the bus services operator in Seville, Spain, issued 67 notices to cars parked in bus lanes, advising drivers that they are parked in lanes reserved for public transport, which includes taxis as well as buses. At present, the notices are just a warning but from 1 October 2012, Tussam will start fining cars €200 (US$246) and two points will be deducted from an offending driver’s licence. The aim of the enforcement campaign is to increase the average speed of buses in Seville

Spain-headquartered Indra has become the technological leader for Medellín's traffic and transportation systems after being awarded two contracts valued at just over US$11 million. The first contract, awarded by the Medellín Subway, will allow the city to have an intermodal public transportation system that is unique in Colombia and will facilitate the management and the combined use of the subway and buses.

A series of road tunnels is taking shape to help relieve Istanbul from crippling road congestion, with an extensive array of safety and management systems operating from a single ITS platform. Nino Sehagic reports. Traffic in Istanbul has historically been described simply as jammed. Severe congestion and chaotic use of available road space are characteristics of a city of more than one and a half million cars. Istanbul’s existing road network could not cope and was in urgent need of expansion, leading the

Efforts to advance national interoperability for tolling systems are gaining momentum, with one protocol promoted by a key operator group emerging as a candidate to form the basis for full AVI interoperability, Tim McGuckin writes. Fuelled by a growing awareness and acceptance of standards-based solutions, the US toll community is quickening towards the goal of interoperability between toll systems across the US. Over 20 years since the advent of electronic toll collection (ETC), key elements are falling in

Image Sensing Systems (ISS) announced yesterday that Kenneth R. Aubrey’s employment as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Image Sensing Systems has been terminated, effective immediately. The board has named Kris B. Tufto, a member of Image Sensing Systems’ board, as interim president and CEO. Tufto has served as a member of the board since September 2011. He will continue to serve on the board, but will step down from the three board committees because his role as interim president and CEO posi

Image Sensing Systems (ISS) announced yesterday that Kenneth R. Aubrey’s employment as president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Image Sensing Systems has been terminated, effective immediately. The board has named Kris B. Tufto, a member of Image Sensing Systems’ board, as interim president and CEO. Tufto has served as a member of the board since September 2011. He will continue to serve on the board, but will step down from the three board committees because his role as interim president and CEO posi

TÜV Rheinland’s ITS group has been selected to provide user acceptance testing (UAT) support for the 495 Express Lanes, the new high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes opening on the Virginia side of the I-495/Capital Beltway at the end of this year. The project is one of the largest transportation endeavours in the US, aiming to ease traffic on one of the country’s most congested corridors and UAT is a key testing component of the project that will involve testing all aspects of the Express Lanes tolling hardware

Europe will emerge as the most competitive regional market for hybrid and electric medium-heavy trucks and buses, globally, according to Frost & Sullivan. This will be particularly true for the transit bus segment, which is expected to experience proliferation of competitors, both on the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and supplier side. Strategic Analysis of the Medium- to Heavy-duty Hybrid and Electric Commercial Vehicle Market in EMEA Region, from Frost & Sullivan, estimates that nearly seven per c

ITS Australia has issued a call for entries for its annual National ITS Awards competition in three categories - ITS Excellence Award, Young Professional Encouragement Award, and Max Lay Life Time Achievement Award. The ITS Excellence Award is given for projects responding to one or more of the themes safety, mobility and/or environment. Within those themes, entries will be judged on how innovative, well developed, sustainable, transferable and interoperable the project is, its environmental effectiveness,

The State of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has selected TransCore ITS to provide its TransSuite traffic control system for managing and centralised monitoring of existing traffic signals statewide. The TransSuite system will be the cornerstone of Caltrans’ strategy to proactively manage traffic through the monitoring of traffic signals and traffic conditions at state-operated intersections. As part of the project, TransCore ITS will develop an interface to the Caltrans controller firmwa

Despite competition clearly increasing within the contactless ticketing market, NXP maintains a dominant foothold, through its line of MiFare solutions, according to ABI Research which says the company achieved a combined market share in excess of 70 per cent for 2011 smart card and RFID ticketing IC shipments. The OSPT continues its quest in penetrating the market with CiPurse product and has certainly had a successful 2012, completing pilots and trials worldwide, leading to two on-going commercial deploym

By awarding Siemens Rail Systems a contract to modify and refurbish 21 light rail vehicles (LRV), Sacramento Regional Transit District (RT) says it will add to its fleet at a fraction of the cost of new vehicles. RT acquired the vehicles, originally built by Urban Transportation Development Corporation (UTDC) - from Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. The vehicles originally went into operation in 1987 and have been in storage since RT acquired them in 2003. They are now needed for RT's expanding s

The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) has released the industry's first major comparative analysis of roll stability systems based on carrier operational data. The institute’s analysed crash rates, crash costs, and technology costs for roll stability control (RSC) and electronic stability control (ESC) systems compared to vehicles without any roll stability systems technology. The research, based on data from over 135,000 heavy trucks, indicated that installation of RSC technology may resul

Kapsch TrafficCom has received a first order for the delivery of on-board units (OBUs) from Brazil. The order has come from SINIAV (Sistema Nacional de Identificação Automática de Veículos) which is an agency of the Ministry of the Cities (MC) and the National Traffic Committee (CONTRAN) in Brazil which foresees the mandatory electronic registration for all vehicles in the country, including passenger cars, trucks and motorbikes.

Jenoptik Traffic Solutions division is moving purposefully ahead with its business expansion in Asia by winning a technically highly challenging traffic safety project in Hong Kong and will be supplying over 30 installations, consisting of a mix of fixed, tunnel and mobile speed enforcement applications in the Tsing Ma and Tsing Sha Control Areas. An approval authority delegation from Hong Kong visited Jenoptik Robot in Germany to successfully perform a factory acceptance test. Close to 70 tests were perfor

Clever Devices has closed a transaction to acquire substantially all of the assets of Digital Recorders, a provider of ITS to public transit agencies throughout North America and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Digital Recorders, (DRI), which filed for bankruptcy in March, 2012. Digital Recorders will become a division of Clever Devices, a technology solutions specialist for all modes of public transportation, including fixed-route, bus rapid transit, paratransit and rail.

A new transportation infrastructure that proposes to revolutionise the way electric vehicles (EVs) are used in the future has been unveiled. The TEV project uses a standardised pre-fabricated construction to greatly reduce local construction costs to deliver mass transport, across all types of terrain, anywhere in the world. It is being developed as an open-source venture, achievable now, using existing technologies. “With a specialised two-lane track, the size of a narrow country road, the capacity on the

3M’s decision to acquire the business of Federal Signal Technologies Group (FSTech) from Federal Signal Corporation for a purchase price of US$110 million in cash provides an insight into the company’s view of the tolling industry’s future health. 3M says the fast-growing US$3 billion electronic tolling industry is projected to grow at a rate greater than 12 per cent per year as government agencies increasingly rely on tolling to fund roadway infrastructure, construction and maintenance. The company says FS

Gatso has officially handed over a section control project on the A2 from Amsterdam to Utrecht to the traffic enforcement team of the Netherlands National Public Prosecutor’s Office (LPTV). The installation on the A2 is an automatic traffic enforcement solution on a highway with five lanes and two hard shoulders. For environmental reasons, the maximum speed limit has been set to 100 km/h instead of the former 120 km/h.

Can the future be predicted? With what accuracy can ‘predictive analytics’ be used to help anticipate demand? This is a relatively new science for transportation and over the next few years it will be interesting to see to what extent it can solve some common problems. Transportation authorities may be close to finding the golden chalice that is accurate prediction of how traffic will behave as congestion occurs. Predictive algorithms are not necessarily new, but the coming together of conditions needed for