Features

Andrew Bardin Williams looks at state-run schemes to encourage green transportation habits with raffles, gift cards, competitions and frequent traveller points. The societal benefits of green transportation are obvious: less congestion, cleaner air and healthy economy. Equally the advantages for individuals are pretty clear too: a healthy lifestyle, freedom of movement and the feeling of being a part of something greater than oneself.

Bus travel booking is moving into the digital age as David Crawford discovers. A global surge in demand for intercity bus travel is fuelling new initiatives to make it easier for passengers to access information and book via the web by, fo example, using multi-sourced metasearch engines

New report highlights how assessing the financial benefit of deploying ITS is an involved and evolving calculation Following a global search, five key action areas have emerged from the New Zealand Transport Agency’s recent scoping of a more comprehensive cost–benefit analysis framework for evaluating planned ITS deployments. A report commissioned from engineering consultancy Aecom New Zealand sets out the groundwork for more closely-defined assessments that will convincingly support public-sector policy ma

Brazil’s incident-prone Regis Bittencourt Highway was once known as ‘the highway of death’ but investment in ITS systems has brought about some big improvements, as Mauro Nogarin discovers Between 2010 and the end of 2014, Brazil made major investments in traffic technology across its national highways with the result that the ITS network went from 4,963km of fibre optics to 8,524km and the number of cameras increased from 1,127 to 3,208.

The EU-co-funded I_ HeERO (Infrastructure_ Harmonised eCall European Pilot) project is working to ensure the readiness of national networks of call centres - known as public safety answering posts (PSAPs) - to deal with automated crash alerts arriving via the continent-wide 112 emergency phone number. Following on from its HeERO and HeERO2 pre-deployment predecessors, which enjoyed €16m (US$17.76m) in EU funding, the new initiative runs from 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2017. It has €30.9 million (US$34.

Timothy Compston considers the challenges faced by the operators of the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden, the largest structure of its kind across Europe. In light of the concerns about the ongoing security threat and the unprecedented flow of migrants, many of the countries that make up the Schengen Area in Europe have re-introduced border controls. For its part, Sweden has rolled out ID checks for train, bus and ferry passengers from Denmark placing the landmark Øresund Bridge very much on the fr

Buses can play a key role in the battle to improve air quality in towns and cities as David Crawford discovers. A city with a population of half a million would gain about US$12.3 million in annualised societal savings if all its buses ran on electricity instead of diesel. This is the conclusion of a wide-ranging analysis carried out by Swedish bus manufacturer Volvo Group and global business consultants KPMG.

Mauro Nogarin looks at the management of the longer tunnels on Mexico’s Durango-Mazatlan highway. In recent years the National Infrastructure Fund of Mexico has increased investment in the installation of ITS systems on selected highways to increase road safety. One such major investment is the 230km long Durango-Mazatlan highway which is 12m in width and has an average speed of 110km/h.

Vaisala’s Dr Kevin Petty explains why the weather will continue to play a big part in road safety and traffic management in the smart cities of the future. The world is becoming increasingly connected. Thanks to advances in information and communications technology, the cities we live in are becoming ‘smart’, with everything from education to law enforcement managed by integrated tech solutions in a bid to improve quality of life.

ITS Germany used its presence at the June 2016 Europe ITS Congress in Glasgow to make two major announcements from the city of Hamburg, country’s second-largest urban area. First came a formal bid to host the 2021 ITS World Congress; second, the global unveiling of new Roadwork Administration and Decision System (ROADS) software.ROADS has emerged to enable coordination of planned transport construction projects several years before start dates, to minimise impacts on traffic flows when work begins.

Having authored HERMES, a major study for the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communication, Josef Czako talks to ITS International about his findings and lessons for other authorities. When CEOs of major automakers are predicting more change in the next five years than in the past 50, what is the role of national authorities considering the benefits of innovations in ITS?

David Crawford looks at new technologies to cope with the age-old problem of driving in bad weather. On the 10-year average, between 2005 and 2014 bad weather contributed to more than 1.5 million vehicle crashes in the US each year, resulting in more than 800,000 injuries and 7,400 deaths. These were the findings of analysis by Booz Allen Hamilton of NHTSA data which concluded that the loss of life, hospital treatment and damage to assets costs an annual average of $42bn.

Colin Sowman reports form Asecap’s Study & Information Days event in Madrid. At Asecap’s (the Association of European Toll Road Operators) recent Study and Information Days event there was no doubt about the subject at the top of the agenda: the European Union Directive 23/2014/EU. This will introduce fundamental changes to the concession model under which Asecap members operate more than 50,000km of tolled highways and, in response, it has compiled a report entitled Proposal for a Sustainable Concession Mo

Xerox’s David Cummins talks to Colin Sowman about the lessons for city authorities from its survey of younger peoples’ attitude to transport. There can be no better way to get a handle on the future of transport demand than to ask the younger generation about how they view and consume today’s transport. Sociologists have called this group Generation Z – those born between 1995 and 2007 – which will make up 40% of all US consumers by 2020.

Cubic’s Andy Taylor considers the growing need for partnerships in the transportation sector. At the end of June, The Guardian newspaper in the UK broke a game-changing transport story – Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is working on a project that aims to radically overhaul parking and transportation in American cities.