News

Singapore’s Land Transport Agency (LTA) is embarking on a six-month trial to study whether the LED light strips are useful in encouraging pedestrians to focus on the traffic signals at pedestrian crossings and whether they are suitable for Singapore’s local context and climate. The light strips, which have been implemented at two pedestrian crossings located near popular amenities frequented by a high volume of pedestrians across different demographics, such as young people and elderly pedestrians.

The Cobb County Department of Transportation (CCDOT) in Georgia, USA, has activated six full-colour dynamic message signs (DMS) in the metropolitan Atlanta area in a bid to improve travel times and enable motorists to choose less-congested routes. The LED signs have been installed on Cobb Parkway, South Marietta Parkway, Roswell Road and Spring Road to provide travel time information for common destinations and indicate the congestion level related to specific routes in real time. Travel times on I-75 and C

Growing consumer preference for convenience-enhancing technologies and automobiles-as-a-service options helped double the adoption of vehicles with automated driving features in 2016, says Frost & Sullivan’s mobility team. Going forward, large-scale investments from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will refine the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive cloud-based technology solutions even further, enabling level 4/5 autonomous driving within the next five years. Retrofitted automated driv

June 2017 sees the completion of the EU UDRIVE project, a practical driving study which aims to provide insight into driver behaviour during every-day trips. The project is recording details of the driver, the vehicle and surrounding traffic in a range of situations including acceleration, lane position, speed, eye movements, traffic densities or road conditions. 120 cars, 32 trucks and 40 scooters have been collecting data for up to 21 months, equipped with several video cameras covering both the external

Ertico is running a free webinar on 11 May, providing details of the highlights of the 12th ITS European Congress, which takes place in Strasbourg on 19-22 June. With over 100 sessions, tours, demos and events taking place over just four days, participants will be spoilt for choice on where to spend time. During the webinar, Eric Sampson, senior advisor to the Congress Programme, will run through the programme and point out interesting sessions and events that visitors can look forward to at the Congress. T

In coordination with Transport for London (TfL), which released open data for the project, Citymapper is testing a Smartbus service for London, which it says could reinvent the bus and improve mobility in congested cities. Starting on 9 and 10 May and running on an experimental route around Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridge, Smartbus uses a smaller vehicle, which Citymapper believes is necessary in crowded cities. It runs on a fixed route and uses bus stops. The bus has a smart display to inform passengers wh

The Milford Road Alliance, a partnership between the New Zealand Transport Agency and Downer NZ to ensure the safe and efficient management of activities on State Highway 94, is to implement new and enhanced weather forecast services from MetService. Climbing through the Southern Alps, State Highway 94 is one of the highest highways in New Zealand. It includes the Milford Road which stretches from Te Anau through Fiordland National Park to Milford Sound and the high-altitude alpine conditions, a steep and r

Global Traffic Technologies (GTT) will demonstrate its Opticom emergency vehicle pre-emption (EVP) system at the Emergency Medical Services Congress’ EMS2017 event in Copenhagen later this month, to show how effectively Opticom can help speed first responders to or from the scene of an incident, avoiding the danger of evading cross-traffic and the delay of manoeuvring past vehicles stopped for a red light. Opticom provides drivers of emergency vehicles with priority control that enables green lights during

The European Disability Forum (EDF) has reacted strongly to the recent EU vote which aims to make key products and services, like phones, e-book readers, operating systems and payment terminals, more accessible to people with disabilities, under new draft EU rules. EDF is an umbrella group representing 100 associations and some 80 million disabled people across the EU. The Internal Market Committee (IMCO) amended and approved the rules, which would apply only to products and services placed on the EU market

The UK government has published a draft plan to improve air quality by reducing nitrogen dioxide levels in the country. The options now open for consultation on reducing nitrogen dioxide in our towns and cities are designed to reduce the impact of diesel vehicles, and accelerate the move to cleaner transport. Local authorities are already responsible for improving air quality in their area, but will now be expected to develop new and creative solutions to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, while avoid

New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT) has appointed Tilson, IBI Group and MobilityTech to implement a design/build intelligent transportation systems (ITS) project along the F. E. Everett Turnpike. The project includes design, planning and installation of dynamic message signs, closed circuit cameras, roadway detectors, and wireless communications systems linking the ITS to the NHDOT Transportation Management Center. These systems help to streamline incident management, improve safety in work z

The second European Machine Vision Forum takes place in Vienna from 6-8 September 2017, with a focus on the next generation of vision systems for industry, such as new modes of image acquisition, new hardware platforms, and advanced algorithms in order to solve more complex tasks with less effort. The forum is hosted and sponsored by the AIT Austrian Institute for Technology and the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing. Aimed at scientists, development engineers, software and hardware engineers, an

Earlier this year Qualcomm, in association with IHS Markit, released a study into the future of the 5G economy. This predicted that by 2035 5G technology will amount to US$3.5 trillion of output and 22 million jobs. It also predicted that the automotive industry would be a key recipient of 5G’s benefits. Qualcomm, UC Berkeley and IHS Markit have released a further report which attempts to shed some light on how this enablement effect of 5G likely impacts the economy at the sector level of this research.

TransCore has been selected by the Municipal Transit Authority of the City of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to integrate its TransSuite software solution with the City’s existing traffic signal controllers in a bid to improve the coordination of multiple traffic management systems. Phase 1 of the project has been deployed and created an integrated system to work with controllers from multiple different manufacturers, as well as the City’s SCATS-based adaptive traffic management system. It also included a pilot imple

The Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) has developed a software solution, Travel Mode Identification (TMI), which it says automatically identifies the travel modes of people carrying a smartphone, making it suitable for applications such as mobility surveys and automated ticketing. The technology allows the collection of data and can be integrated into existing smartphone apps. It automatically classifies eight different travel modes, walking, cycling, riding a motorcycle, car, bus, tram or train; no us