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.”
CSRS is a new no-dig technology and construction method from MaxCell that removes inner ducting from around active fiber optic cables with virtually no load on cable and no interruption of service. Inner ducts can be are removed at a rate of up to 3m (10ft) per min and up to 90% conduit space is recovered. The cables fall to bottom of conduit allowing up to nine more cables to be placed in recovered space. Replacing with new ducting can cost upwards of $3000 per metre ($1,000 per foot) in cities.
Vaisala, a leader in the measurement and decision support of a vast variety of weather technologies, will use its position as a leader in road weather ITS sensors, decision support tools, and consultation, to highlight not just equipment but software systems. As the company points out, managing decisions around road weather is as important as the sensors and systems, and can be easier with Vaisala RoadDSS Manager software. Manager helps with reporting, communication, and simplifies the information needed to
Visitors to the ITS America Annual Meeting will have an opportunity of seeing a new wireless roadway detection system from Trafficware. Operating under a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) patent in an exclusive license agreement, the company’s engineers developed the Valence Pod, a wireless system that uses roadway sensors to detect the presence of vehicles. The device can be used individually for a smaller zone or grouped with other Pods to create a larger, smarter detection zone. The omni-direct
Big data keeps these entrepreneurs up at night, but in a good way. Self-described “transit data nerds”, the guys at Transit Labs are working to help build smarter cities through intelligent transportation services.
