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
Read time: 2 mins
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.”
Canada-headquartered International Road Dynamics (IRD) is here in Vienna to present integrated ITS solutions that make highways more efficient. The company is showcasing products, software, and fully integrated systems for automated truck weigh stations using high-speed and low speed weigh-in-motion (WIM), automated toll collection and audit systems, highway traffic management systems (HTMS), advanced traffic data collection, security and access control, and fleet management using GPS. As IRD points out, it
TSS-Transport Simulation Systems’ (TSS) Aimsun traffic simulation software, capable of fusing static, dynamic and hybrid approaches within a single environment, will be a feature of the company’s participation at the ITS World Congress. But it is a sister application, Aimsun Online, that will grab a lot of attention from delegates and not just because it provides a real-time decision support system for traffic management. Its dynamic, high-speed simulation of large areas allows traffic operators to accurate
In the UK, train services in the south-west remain disrupted after violent winter storms destroyed track; eastern Europe enjoyed an unusually mild winter; in the USA, 2012 saw 300 deaths due to violent weather events and an estimated $110 billion in damage.
Fresh from success in helping the Russian city of Sochi prepare for the Winter Olympics, Czech traffic technology company Cross is showing two new products at Intertraffic.
Its RS 4S traffic controller is a more compact, cost-efficient version of its existing model. Head of sales Tomáš Pospíšek described it as a ‘4.5 generation’ model, which could handle all but the most complex intersections. “It’s a little more simplified than the existing model, but more than enough for most intersections you would find