Features

A friend of mine's wife used to work on a ladies' magazine. A mid-shelf affair, it would contain the usual round of photo stories on this season's look, interviews with celebrities - some of whom I'd almost heard of - and those 'What does he really think of me?/Why do men act the way they do?' questionnaires.

A friend of mine's wife used to work on a ladies' magazine. A mid-shelf affair, it would contain the usual round of photo stories on this season's look, interviews with celebrities - some of whom I'd almost heard of - and those 'What does he really think of me?/Why do men act the way they do?' questionnaires.

Andrew Bardin Williams explores the efforts under way in North Dakota to consult with native tribes during the early stages of transportation project development. These efforts have led to the signing of a Programmatic Agreement between the state DOT and local tribes and the creation of a tribal consultation committee that allows Native Americans to advise on the identification, evaluation and treatment of historic properties, including those of religious and cultural significance

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).

What will the traffic management centre of the future see and do? TNO's Frans op de Beek, who was responsible for putting together the Cooperative Mobility Demonstrations which included the Traffic Management Centre at this year's Intertraffic exhibition in Amsterdam, offers some insights. The road tours and demonstrations which took place at this year's Intertraffic to mark the conclusion of COOPERS, CVIS and SAFESPOT, the European Commission's (EC's) three major cooperative mobility projects, gave visitor

As IP-based technology makes its presence felt in the control room sector, it makes for greater economies of scale and also offers a migration path for many other traffic management technologies. So says Barco's Guy Van Wijmeersch. Efficient control room collaboration and decision-making is only possible if operators and decision-makers have easy and timely access to information. In many cases, that information also needs to be accessible to multiple users at the same time. This is certainly so in the case

Increasing the capability of automatic number plate recognition should go hand-in-hand with efforts to ensure number plates' integrity, says the ESVA's Viv Nicholas. Before we apply increasingly sophisticated technology to Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), says the European Secure Vehicle Alliance's (ESVA's) executive director Viv Nicholas, there is a lot we can do to make the task of vehicle recognition simpler by addressing issues relating to the number plate itself.

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.

Automatic number plate recognition continues to find new applications beyond the traditional. In coming years, we can expect the application set to grow significantly Moore's Law has seen to it that computer processing power has improved out of all comparison in the 30-plus years since the first working Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system was created by the UK's Police Scientific Development Branch. The attendant increases in systems' capabilities have resulted in ANPR being deployed globally

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.

Traffic signal control is a mainstay of urban congestion management. Despite advances in vehicle detection sensors, inductive loops, which operate by using a magnetic field to detect the metal components in vehicles, are still the most common enabler for intelligent signalised junctions.

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.