As visitors to the Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
September 7, 2014
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Transforming the portfolio: Jenny Simonsen of Q-Free
As visitors to the 108 Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
With the event being staged in Detroit, it provides Q-Free with an opportunity to highlight its appreciable presence in the North American market. Recently it acquired 5660 Open Roads Consulting, a specialist in advanced transportation management and traveller information systems that operates mission-critical traffic systems and undertakes video-based surveillance of critical assets in 30 states across the US.
Previously, Q-Free bought 7045 TCS International, a US-based, international supplier of advanced parking guidance systems. Meanwhile, Dacolian USA, another Q-Free group company, is North America’s major supplier of automatic number plate recognition and vehicle signature recognition image processing software.
Nevertheless, says Thomas Falck, CEO, these developments have to be considered in an international context: “The North American region will play an increasing part in our future but it is the international nature of our business which remains one of our core strengths. We will be keen to demonstrate at the 6456 ITS World Congress that with offices around the world, we have a huge range of talent and experience on which to draw. This means we can create solutions which benefit from the best of global practice but which, nevertheless, are closely tailored to local needs.”
In the demonstration areas of the ITS World Congress, Telespazio, a joint venture between Finmeccanica and Thales, will showcase LCS, a ‘plug-in’ solution that enables easy retrofitting of existing GPS systems to use and exploit the capabilities of the EGNOS Commercial Service. The demonstration will show its use in an ITS system for tracking and tracing operational tankers transporting hydrocarbon in Europe.
BMS Bicycle Management System is the new way of cycle parking designed to provide a solution to many city councils to get their city centres neat and clean and encourage bicycle use. The system incorporates a mobile app that enables a cyclist to easily find a free bike parking place at their destination on a smartphone.
Turkey-headquartered KentKart will use the ITS World Congress to show a new generation of onboard public transport tablet. The KentTablet provides contactless fare collection through a capacitive LCD touch screen, vehicle tracking and fleet management, passenger information in vehicle and at the station, employee management, emergency and alarm management, and onboard video surveillance services for public and private transportation companies.
In a wide ranging speech to the World Congress opening ceremony, US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx (pictured) acknowledged the potential gains ITS can provide, praised the work already done and challenged the industry to work with USDOT on technical matters.
