Features

David Crawford investigates the potential of new projection technology. Fifty years on from its invention of the microchip, US company Texas Instruments (TI) has compressed the technology into a surface area of just 4.3mm. As such, it forms the heart of a new Pico Digital Light Processing (DLP) system that is set to transform travel information delivery for millions of users on the move - by making it projectable.

Kallistratos Dionelis, General Secretary of ASECAP, ponders the absence of creativity and innovation in the road management sector. 'Traditional' road managers and ITS specialists share many of the same ultimate goals and yet, he says, a common understanding of what technology can achieve is still conspicuously absent.

Kallistratos Dionelis, General Secretary of ASECAP, ponders the absence of creativity and innovation in the road management sector. 'Traditional' road managers and ITS specialists share many of the same ultimate goals and yet, he says, a common understanding of what technology can achieve is still conspicuously absent.

Kallistratos Dionelis, General Secretary of ASECAP, ponders the absence of creativity and innovation in the road management sector. 'Traditional' road managers and ITS specialists share many of the same ultimate goals and yet, he says, a common understanding of what technology can achieve is still conspicuously absent.

Jack Short of the International Transport Forum discusses the role of stimulus finding and the path in and out of recession. The US Government has grabbed many headlines with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), its response to the need to do something to prevent stagnation in the face of the recent economic downturn.

The US Department of Transportation's ITS Joint Program Office has issued a Request for Information for its next five-year plan, which will emphasis the transformative potential of wireless connectivity. Shelley Row, ITS JPO Director, writes. During his confirmation hearing in January, US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood emphasised that the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) will remain committed to improving the safety of the country's transportation system under his leadership, and will engage in

Caltrans District 7 is finalising a ConOps document which will detail a plug-and-play to work zone ITS operation. The organisation's Allen Z. Chen elaborates. Before August is out, on current planning, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 7 (which covers Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, with a combined population of close to 11 million people) intends to have finalised a Concept of Operations (ConOps) document dealing with Work Zone Transportation Management Systems (WZTMS). The

Bern Grush recently attended the Mileage-Based User Fee Conference in Austin Texas where the fledgling American landscape for Road User Charging is beginning to take shape. When I was a kid I liked to poke sticks into the ants' nests in sidewalk cracks. Ants would scatter in every conceivable direction. They ran in circles, they ran over and through each other. They screamed without logic. I was fascinated.

TransCore's David Sparks writes about the development of 95 Express, Florida Department of Transportation's new high-occupancy tolling facility. High-Occupancy Tolling (HOT) lanes are one of the most compelling uses of existing transportation infrastructure to expand capacity, particularly in major metropolitan areas which have limited right of way but need to relieve congestion. According to the Federal Highway Administration, while vehicle miles travelled have increased over 70 per cent in the past 20 yea

Justin McNew, Chief Technology Officer, Kapsch TrafficCom Inc., USA offers his opinion of where 5.9GHz DSRC technology will head in the coming years. The debate ranges back and forth over the most suitable technological solution for future tolling and charging in the US. However, the coming trend is common cooperative infrastructure: instrumented roads and vehicles with the capacity to communicate with each other over all manner of safety, mobility and traveller applications, many of which will involve fina

Michael Schagrin and Raymond Resendes provide an update on the US Department of Transportation's vehicle-to-vehicle programme. The US Department of Transportation's (USDOT's) Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) programme, which is concerned with wireless inter-vehicle communications for safety applications such as crash avoidance/mitigation, is a major safety component of the USDOT IntelliDrive cooperative infrastructure programme.

US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood talks to ITS International about economic stimulus funding and the absolute need to maintain and increase the use of technology in transportation. Of the total of $787 billion of funding announced under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the economic stimulus package which was signed into law by US President Barack Obama on 17 February 2009, $48.1 billion will go to the US Department of Transportation (USDOT). Of that, $27.5 billion is for highway in

The German AKTIV project is researching several cooperative driving applications for use in work zones. PTV's Michael Ortgiese details progress. The steep increases in traffic volumes predicted back in the early 1990s have unfortunately been proven to be more than accurate. In Germany, the AKTIV project continues to look into cooperative technologies' potential to reduce the impact of those increased traffic volumes and keep traffic moving despite limitations in infrastructure capacity.

Geographic Information Systems are a relatively late adopter of cloud computing,but the benefits of host services for geospatial data and analysis are becoming clear. Jason Barnes reports Both the concept and the reality of cloud computing have been around for some time. More and more industry sectors are entrusting external service providers with the provision of their computing services via the internet. However, the Geographic Information System (GIS) industry has been slow to embrace the trend. This is

Geographic Information Systems are a relatively late adopter of cloud computing,but the benefits of host services for geospatial data and analysis are becoming clear. Jason Barnes reports Both the concept and the reality of cloud computing have been around for some time. More and more industry sectors are entrusting external service providers with the provision of their computing services via the internet. However, the Geographic Information System (GIS) industry has been slow to embrace the trend. This is