Features

Wes Guckert considers possible solutions and countermeasures to the problems of increased freight deliveries in growing cities. In January 2016, the US Department of Transportation (USDoT) conducted a session on the SmartCity Challenge and Urban Freight and Logistics. This session was a follow-up to the USDoT report titled, Beyond Traffic 2045.

AAdvances in LiDAR are helping transport authorities improve services and identify potential problem areas, as geospatial technology expert Dr Neil Slatcher explains. The effects of climate change on the transport infrastructure have long been a cause of concern within the transportation sector - and not only on the structures themselves but also on the surrounding areas. This year, those concerns have become reality with landslides, structural collapses and surfacing issues impacting services across the wo

All encompassing, city-wide transport monitoring and control systems are beginning to make their way onto the market, as Colin Sowman hears. The futuristic vision of cities where everything is connected and operated with maximum efficiency by a gigantic computer remains a distant prospect but related sectors and services are beginning to coalesce: transport monitoring and control for instance.

Making a city smarter not only relies on understand technological opportunities but also human decision-making, as Miller Crockart explains. Cities are about people – a fact that can easily be forgotten when experts talk about roads, healthcare and education as though they are abstract and unconnected monoliths rather than things people use. Understanding how and why people use services is vital for making decisions on how they can be optimised for maximum efficiency across inter-connected networks that for

The rise of cybercrime is starting to impact tolling concessions, as Colin Sowman discovers. Yahoo’s revelation that it has taken two years to discover that it had suffered a security breach resulting in hackers stealing the details of 500 million users is shocking - although the hackers only gained access to users’ names, contact details and encrypted passwords.

Sony’s Arnaud Destruels explains the benefits of CMOS sensors for ITS applications. In the transport sector roadside, trackside and platform cameras were devices for viewing and assessing a situation while individual sensors did all the clever stuff like traffic counting, speed calculation, queue lengths, signal status and so on. Well, not any more.

A shortened and tailored cost benefit assessment is helping show the worth of C-ITS in Australia. An Australian ‘rapid cost-benefit assessment’ method, introduced to help prepare the ground for co-operative ITS (C-ITS) deployment and showcased at the ITS World Congress in Melbourne, has generated encouraging results.

Cheaper and easier communications are providing authorities with new options for influencing driver behaviour. Colin Sowman reports. It’s official; Average speed cameras (ASCs) cut the number of fatal or serious injury crashes by more than a third.

Michael Maitland from Kapsch TrafficCom looks at how the various forms of tolling can help authorities combat traffic congestion and air quality problems while simultaneously raising revenue.

ITS Australia has welcomed the country's National Transport Commission's roadmap of regulatory reform for automated vehicles, Ertico-ITS Europe has been appointed as the work-package leader for dissemination, exploitation and standardisation for the EU’s Cloud LSVA, French opportunities in the Italian ITS market formed the theme of ITS France’s first international breakfast meeting, TTS Italia vice president Diego Galletta highlighted the role of new technology solutions, Chris Philip, ITS Canada’s new boar

HDR consultants, Brian Swindell and Bernie Arseanea, consider managed lanes’ untapped potential. It is no surprise that corridor planning continues to challenge agencies and owners as demand continues to surpass roadway capacity.

Eric O’Rear, Wallace Tyner and Kemal Sarica examine the far-reaching implications of replacing fuel taxes with a mileage tax. Lawmakers at both the federal and state level are frustrated over declining fuel tax revenues as they struggle to fund projects for constructing and maintaining state-wide infrastructure.

David Crawford explores some promising innovations for North American commuters. North America is experiencing a surge in commuter rail and metro development. The US now has 75 light rail and metro networks in operation; and California, in particular, is actively exploring ways of developing the state’s existing passenger rail operations into a fully integrated system.

IBTTA’s Patrick Jones contemplates the need for, sources of and constraints on transportation innovation. For years now, visionary thinkers and doers in the highway transportation community have been laser-focused on the role of innovation in addressing the most pressing mobility challenges.

Data handling is becoming an ever-greater part of transportation and never more so than with autonomous vehicles, as Andrew Bardin Williams hears from some big names.