Features

Christos Economou, Deputy Head of Unit dealing with land transport within the European Commission’s DG MOVE, describes a new framework for road charging in Europe to Jason Barnes. Within the European Union (EU), two Directives shape the legislative framework on road charging. Directive 1999/62/EC sets up a number of rules to make sure that national road charging schemes do not distort competition on the internal market or discriminate between hauliers. It is misleadingly called ‘Eurovignette’ after the comm

David Crawford looks at moves to increase throughput and safety in work zones.

Paul Godsmark gives his views on what the advent of autonomous vehicles would mean for the wider society. Further to your article ‘Driver not required…’ in the Jan/Feb edition of ITS International which gave some great background to autonomous road vehicle (ARVs), I feel that the bigger picture is needed to aid understanding. There is a ‘technology freight train’ heading our way that is going to transform our roadways but we don’t seem to be aware of it and, therefore, are in no hurry to react.

David Crawford welcomes new lives for old road safety products. Traffic cones and barrels have traditionally been on the bottom shelf of the road construction and maintenance industry, typically forming visible soft safety barriers for temporary works at a lower cost than concrete alternatives. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, they are fast gaining new roles as instrumented components in advanced construction safety arrays. The EC-sponsored €1 million (US$1.31 million) Safelane collaborative innovati

David Crawford reviews developments in temporary ITS. Widespread take-up of technologies such as Bluetooth and wi-fi are encouraging the emergence of more sophisticated, while still cost effective, ITS responses to the traffic issues posed by temporary road situations such as work zones and special events. Andy Graham of traffic solutions specialists White Willow Consulting says: “A machine-to-machine radio link is far easier and cheaper than reading characters on a plate.” There can be other plusses. Tech

Seamless multi-modal traveller information services are becoming reality in the Danube Region. On 15th of March 2013, a Hungarian national holiday of which many people were unaware, unexpected extreme winter weather paralysed Hungary as well as large parts of Slovakia. Several thousand people were stranded on the region’s highways and the railways incurred delays of several hours. Not only did the transport system in the affected regions break down, the information flow to neighbouring countries was very sl

Rich pickings are now available in a maturing market supplying screens and processors for traffic management operations. Jon Masters reviews what’s on offer. Competition in supply of technology for traffic management and control centres has increased significantly in recent years. Suppliers introduced better products and customers are changing the way they operate, which benefits traffic authorities and emergency services alike. These are the views of Electrosonic’s control rooms solutions sales manager Pa

Astronomical is not too grand a term to describe the current rate of growth in transportation-related data. Massive amounts of traffic related information, such as speed, volume, incidents and weather are being generated every second by road operators and users alike. Big data’ derives its name from the sheer amount and complexity of available raw data. Its potential value is starting to emerge among the intelligent transportation systems community. A gold rush is taking place to capture this value, with da

Eric Sampson takes a look at why the European Union’s eCall system is taking rather longer to arrive than it should. There’s an old story about the person who asked an Irishman for directions and after much thought he responded: “If you’re going there from here it would be better to start from somewhere else.” This came to mind when I was recently reflecting on eCall and wondering when it will come - some stakeholders say the answer is never. So despite years of workshops and discussions, eCall is still not

Jason Barnes asks leading machine vision industry figures what they consider to be the educational barriers to the technology’s increased uptake by the ITS sector. The recent rush by some organisations within the ITS sector to associate themselves with the term ‘machine vision’ underlines just how important the technology has become in a relatively short space of time. However, despite the technology having been applied in certain traffic management applications for some years, there remains a significant s

Jason Barnes speaks to leading figures from the automated enforcement sector about whether a truly international standard for automated enforcement systems is necessary or can ever be achieved. Recent reports of further press controversy in the US over automated enforcement (see ‘Focusing on accuracy?’, ITS International raise again the issue of standards and what constitutes ‘good enough’ in terms of system accuracy and overall solution effectiveness. Comparatively, automated enforcement has always expe

David Crawford reviews innovations in the comfort zone. Anyone who rides public transport knows that, perhaps second only to delays, overcrowding is a critical part of the passenger experience,” says Nir Erez, CEO of Moovit, the Israel-based social transportation app developer. The app is aimed at taking real-time user feedback on transit and making it available to a wider audience of travellers. Currently available on iPhone and Android, it plans to add Windows 8 and other platforms in the future. Moovit i

While initial cost of radar based detection may be higher than that traditional loops, lower maintenance costs more than balance the books. Following successful field tests, the US city of Greenville, North Carolina, has recently agreed a new policy of phasing in Wavetronix traffic sensor technology’s radar-based SmartSensor Matrix system across its signalised traffic intersections. City traffic engineer Rik DiCesare expects the incremental implementation to deliver benefits to both the city’s taxpayers an

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