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.”
A new smart road stud from New Zealand-based company SolarBright can warn drivers of potentially icy roads and will soon be able to alert traffic management centres and maintenance depots of the treacherous conditions. Once installed in the road the solar-powered studs monitor humidity and temperature and if the temperature drops to 4°C or below the blue LEDs in the stud start to flash to alert drivers of the possibility of ice formation.
Swedish-headquartered Sensys Traffic is looking forward to a very successful Intertraffic event. On the basis that success breeds success, in just the last few weeks alone, the company has notched up important sales. Sensys has received sub-orders worth over €9.5 million from the Swedish Transport Administration to supply measurement systems and measurement cabinets for traffic safety cameras for the Swedish ATC system, with indications of further business volume in the forthcoming years. Earlier this month
Citilog, a global leader in AID (automatic incident detection), is here at Intertraffic to introduce XCamEdge, a new innovation in the company’s XCam smart sensor series. Initially developed and designed for intersection control applications such as presence detection with XCam-p, the XCam range quickly expanded, with the XCam-ng, to smart detection for intersections with queue monitoring and anti-gridlock applications. Indeed, the latest success for the XCam-ng is the smart traffic control system in Sochi
The Swiss Federal Roads Office will showcase a traffic management and control system based on a service-oriented architecture called INA (Integrated Applications). This system will allow the integration of all parties relevant to traffic management such as national and regional Traffic Management Centres (TMCs) and the police. The Zurich regional TMC will demonstrate how cooperation happens between the canton, the cities of Zurich and Winterthur as well as the national roads in the conurbation around Zurich
