News

With Britain’s busy roads accounting for 90 per cent of motorised travel in the UK for business and leisure purposes, the UK’s Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) is calling on the Government to speed up its development of a proper high level strategy and funding package for Britain’s strategic roads network. Steve Agg, chief executive of CILT, said: ‘The strategic road network is vital to the efficiency of transport and its contribution to economic growth. Developing a long-term strateg

In an effort to make their roads as safe as those of Europe, the Sultanate of Oman is investing in enforcement technology. As part of this initiative, the Royal Oman Police has awarded Vitronic a contract to supply 200 Poliscan fixed speed enforcement systems and 26 red light enforcement systems. The first systems have already been delivered and the remainder is currently being manufactured.

Kapsch TraffiCom Australia is to install a new open road tolling system on Sydney’s M5 south west motorway. The contract, worth over US$10.5 million has been awarded by Australia’s Interlink Roads, who, in partnership with the New South Wales Government, have developed a programme of enhancements to the motorway to provide three lanes in each direction between Camden Valley Way and King Georges Road.

Satellite navigation provider Garmin, is teaming with Inrix, leaders in the field of traffic intelligence technology to provide up-to-the-minute traffic information across the DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) network. By leveraging the latest breakthroughs in DAB technology, Inrix will help Garmin deliver better, more detailed live traffic data, updated more frequently and without an internet connection. Garmin says this new generation of “Garmin 3D Traffic Live” will provide their customers access to fully

Vialis and Nedap are to join forces to improve traffic flow in Dutch cities and make parking easier. Vialis, a subsidiary of VolkerWessels, will integrate its Vivaldi dynamic traffic management system with the Nedap Sensit wireless parking space detection system. A large number of municipalities in the Netherlands already use Vivaldi to optimise traffic flow via traffic control systems and signs; Sensit wirelessly detects vacant parking spaces.

The government of New Zealand aims to improve road safety in the country by installing more speed cameras nationwide. Currently, the ratio of speed cameras per 0.1 million people stands at 1.3 compared to 2.5 and 4.8 in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria respectively. The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) is to be allocated US$8.05mn to increase the number of speed cameras from the existing 55 units to 100 or more by 2015.

A third round of funding for low-carbon buses has been announced by the Scottish government. A total of £3 million (US£4.7 million) will be available to bus operators under the Green Bus Fund 3 scheme. Keith Brown, Scottish transport minister, said the first two rounds helped nine operators introduce 74 new eco-friendly buses. Lothian Buses, which secured funds in an earlier round, said its new ADL Enviro 400H hybrids are 56.7% more fuel efficient than the old buses they replaced.

Kapsch TrafficCom IVHS is to supply the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) with their IDS 2.0 integrated incident detection system (IDS) for the Washburn Tunnel in Houston, Texas, the south’s largest and first toll-free vehicular tunnel. The non-invasive detection system will be linked to 14 fixed roadway cameras for incident direction for two-way traffic in the vehicular tunnel and up to six infrared intrusion detection cameras in the ventilation tunnel, enabling tunnel operators to provide cost-e

California's Bay Area Climate Collaborative (BACC) and Swarco Traffic Americas are to collaborate to advance the market for energy efficient, adaptive lighting technologies through the Bay Area Next Generation Streetlight Initiative, a region-wide project to upgrade 200,000+ municipal street lights to advanced light-emitting diode (LED) technology.

Zenith Hygiene Group is saving almost 600 tonnes of CO2 a year with TomTom fleet management technology, enabled by Vodafone, according to independent research. Zenith’s estimated 597-tonne saving was achieved with TomTom’s tracking, navigation and ecoPlus devices installed across its vehicle fleet. The vehicles use Vodafone’s global machine-to-machine services which enable businesses to connect, monitor and manage devices across the world.

Large scale, real-life, high profile V2V and V2I trials in both the United States and Germany are are catching the headlines, putting ITS in the limelight after more than a decade of procrastination, according to ABI research. The US DoT Safety Pilot program involves 3,000 vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In Germany, 120 vehicles in the simTD project (Safe Intelligent Mobility, test- field Germany) will roam the Rhine-Main region until the end of the year and will be focused on traffic, road safety, and ef

Moxa has equipped Taiwan’s Hsuehshan Tunnel with its NPort 5230 device servers and EDS-508A-SS-SC Ethernet switches as part of the tunnel emergency traffic control system. The tunnel is south east Asia's second longest road tunnel and comprises three independent tunnels (one pilot tunnel, one West-bound tunnel, and one east-bound tunnel) stretching 12.9 kilometers through Hsuehshan Mountain, the second highest mountain in East Asia.

Swedish authorities are to install a further 600 new speed cameras will in a bid to tackle a rising number of speeding offences. Ylva Berg, coordinator at the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket), said that while the rise in speeding has been just under 1 per cent it must still be tackled as a further rise would increase the number of traffic fatalities.

With the launch of its Pro 5150 Truck Live, TomTom enables truck drivers to safely navigate throughout Europe on truck-friendly routes, avoiding dimensional, weight and hazardous materials restrictions. The device gives specially designed truck routing information based on truck type, load, height, weight, length, restrictions, and maximum speed. Using this data and a database of actual road speeds,

The New Zealand government has unveiled plans to spend US$10.3 billion on the country's land transport system over the next three years, partly funded by increases in petrol excise duty and road user charges. Transport minister Gerry Brownlee said the programme was the largest of its kind in New Zealand's history and would fund transport infrastructure and services around New Zealand such as state highway improvements and the Government's "roads of national significance".