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.”
International Road Dynamics (IRD) is presenting WIM sensors, electronics, scales, traffic classifiers, and systems for commercial vehicle operations at booth 218. The company will present integrated solutions that make commercial vehicle enforcement more economical and effective, systems for data collection and solutions for toll operations. IRD develops software for automated weigh stations (WIM), traffic data collection, and automated toll collection.
Last month, the City of Amsterdam achieved a first with the implementation of its new digital Penalty Charge Notice (PCN), facilitated by the Scanman application developed by Agendum, a Dutch parking enforcement solutions specialist.
Agendum points out that although the first step in increasing the efficiency of parking enforcement is digital scanning of licence plates by using mobile ANPR, a fast and accurate back-office is required in order to gain efficiency in the whole enforcement process.
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In an effort to break stagnation in the DSRC market, Arada Systems has developed a DSRC radio that can plug into any device with a USB port. The idea is that USB will help proliferate DSRC and drive down pricing, leading to a wave of new applications and innovation.
A ‘game changer’ has been unveiled on the Siemens stand in the form of the Sitraffic sX, a new generation traffic lights and detectors controller, which can be updated remotely from internet enabled devices without interrupting normal operation. This enables the system to be remotely controlled and managed in real-time using devices such as a tablet while still ensuring intersection safety and reducing downtime.
