News

The Western Australia Government to provide an investment of US$103 million (AU$129 million) over the next four years for improvements across the State's cycling network. The funding will allow at least 95 kilometres of cycling path to be added to the network, as well as a range of community cycling initiatives. It includes US$44 million (AU$55 million) towards filling gaps on the current Principal Shared Path (PSP) network around Perth and US$23 million (AU$29 million) in grants for local governments.

Transport for London (TfL) has begun an eight-week public consultation on plans to make trams in London ‘cashless’. The proposal would see existing cash ticket machines, which only sell a small number of the more expensive paper tickets every week and do not allow customers to top-up their Oyster card, removed from the tram network. As the ticket machines, which were installed when the tram system opened in 2000, have such low usage and have now reached the end of their useful life

Figures released by the Idaho Transportation Department indicate that weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems installed at the state’s four points of entry (POE) have saved the trucking industry time and money in the last year. The data shows that trucks bypassing the port save an average of five minutes of time per incident, and almost a half a gallon of fuel. This amounts to a savings of about US$8.68 per bypass. Commercial trucks using WIM to bypass Idaho ports saved 33,365 hours and more than 16,000 gallons of

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has selected Louis Berger to provide consultancy services for the preparation of detailed designs to upgrade around 7820 km of roads for two major road packages in southern India under the Bharatmala-Pariyojna scheme. The projects will include road widening and alignment; repaving; upgrades to intersections, bridges, bypasses and service roads; new toll plaza design; and improvements for more efficient traffic flow.

A consortium of Shell Deutschland Oil and Shell Energy Europe with partners ITM Power, SINTEF, thinkstep and Element Energy plans a project to install a large scale electrolyser to produce hydrogen at the Wesseling refinery site within the Rheinland Refinery Complex. With a capacity of ten megawatts, this would be the largest unit of its kind in Germany and the world’s largest PEM (Polymer Electrolyte Membrane) electrolyser.

Mobile Visual Information Systems (MVIS) has implemented its DATEX journey time solution (JTS) on Highway’s England’s US$1.9 billion (£1.5billion) A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon upgrade scheme, enabling an average of 85,000 drivers daily who use the 21 mile stretch of road to navigate the roadworks. The project incorporates 26 Bartco UK VMS-Cs variable message signs which display journey times from their locations to the end of the affected stretch of road

The city of Toronto, Canada has seen an average drop of 40 per cent in the number of collisions causing a death or serious injury at intersections equipped with red light cameras, according to the Toronto Star. At some locations, there have been no deaths or serious injuries caused by collisions since the cameras were installed.The city has almost doubled its red light cameras as part of a plan it says is aimed at eliminating traffic death and serious injuries.

The German division of UK telecommunications firm Vodafone is equipping the Aldenhoven Testing Center (ATC) test track in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany with the latest 5G network technology to enable the ATC to test autonomous vehicle concepts such as autonomous braking. ATC says the technology will transfer data volumes of up to ten gigabits per second with latencies of less than ten milliseconds as LTE successors.

Swedish automotive safety systems manufacturer Autoliv is to provide a global automaker with its 77GHz high-resolution radar systems for autonomous driving. Autoliv's 77GHz radar systems, located on the four corners of the vehicle, see oncoming vehicles and autonomously manage lane changes during highway driving.

Spanish infrastructure company Ferrovial Services and Renault are to implement a car sharing service in Madrid from October 2017, with an initial fleet of 500 electric vehicles located within the M-30 beltway and in some adjoining areas. The service will use the new Renault ZOE Z.E 40, an electric car with a rated autonomy of 400 km, which extends range and usage time. The cars also have a capacity of five seats

Dutch navigation company TomTom has inaugurated its latest Traffic Centre at its Centre of Excellence in Pune, India. The TomTom Traffic centre will help in delivering a real time, comprehensive understanding of traffic speeds on the entire road network, including rich live and historic insights into traffic flows and trends.

Following a vote on the 2018 European Union general budget by the Transport and Tourism Committee (TRAN), chair Karima Delli said that, by adopting its 2018 budget, the TRAN Committee has given clear priorities for the future of mobility in the EU. She went on to say that in a period of great uncertainty for the next EU budgets due to Brexit, it is very important that the EU secures and speeds up research and innovation programmes such as SESAR.

Technology company Indra is leading the European R&D&i project BeCamGreen, which aims to develop a solution based on computer vision and big data, to contribute to reducing traffic, that enables the automated identification of vehicle types and their number of occupants, in real time and with precision.

Southeast Asian on-demand transportation and mobile payments platform Grab has launched a new data-focused pilot programme with Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Financial Services Corporation and Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance.The project aims to use data analysis to enable Grab to offer its driver partners across the region improved access to connected car services that will improve their experience on the Grab platform.

Two major new road schemes worth more than US$388 million (£300 million) are set to cut congestion and improve journey times for hundreds of thousands of drivers in Merseyside and Cheshire, UK. Highways England has set out its preferred options for upgrading the key route to the Port of Liverpool and creating a new junction on the M56 near Runcorn following public consultations earlier this year.