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.”
Honda has a big presence at this year’s World Congress with a large display in the exhibition hall and live on-road demonstrations. One of the key exhibits is a prototype in-car system through which android and Apple smartphones can be connected to, displayed on and controlled by the car’s standard instrumentation. Video demonstrations highlight a family of V2X communication technology that warns car drivers, pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists if they are on a collision course with each other.
Last Monday morning two bomb blasts went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. By Friday night the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was in police custody. After he survived a gunfight with police and slipped out of a dragnet, Massachusetts State Police finally spotted him via a thermal imaging technology manufactured by Flir.
Iteris will use its presence at the 23rd ITS America Annual Meeting to highlight how the company is doing its part to mitigate congestion through planning, engineering, and implementing technology based solutions. The company says its focus is to measure (collect travel behaviour and pattern data); manage (analyse and monitor travel conditions); inform (provide real-time information to traffic managers and motorists); and guide (deliver actionable and predictive information).
The Barrier.Gate, an intelligent barrier system from Skidata, is an inexpensive solution for long-term parking facilities because it combines column and barrier in one product. Less consumption of energy and space are among its sustainable benefits. The barrier communicates via light signals of the integrated track light, while the built-in camera helps to prevent vandalism and unauthorised entry through a closing barrier.
