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A full scale major incident emergency exercise has been carried out in the UK’s brand new Hindhead Tunnel on the A3 in Surrey. Located just to the south of London, the A3 route carries heavy traffic volumes and the existing road link has been a major bottleneck for capacity as well as proving a safety risk for the area. The new tunnel, due to open soon will relieve traffic jams in the area and boost capacity.

Ford Motor Company says it is tripling production capacity of its electrified vehicle lineup through 2013, further boosting volumes of its all-new C-Max Hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid, which begin production next year.

Ford Motor Company says it is tripling production capacity of its electrified vehicle lineup through 2013, further boosting volumes of its all-new C-Max Hybrid and C-Max Energi plug-in hybrid, which begin production next year.

Iteris has introduced Abacus 2.0, its next generation traffic incident detection and data collection product that provides traffic engineers and departments of transportation a software-based ‘force multiplier’ that leverages existing camera systems to collect real-time traffic data, rapidly identify incidents, and gain enhanced traffic flow information in a ready-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) format.

The cities of Salerno, Vienna and Gothenburg, working within the Cosmo project, have agreed to implement a test bed for various cutting edge technologies developed in recent research European programmes (Cvis, Coopers, Safespot). The pilots will mainly focus on eco-traffic management, but other types of services such as eco-driving support, co-modality, traffic sensitive street lighting, and access management will also be addressed within the project.

A pilot project which began last month and which saw trucks banned on toll roads in Jakarta city, Indonesia, has produced dramatic results. The ban helped to cut traffic congestion in the city by 40 per cent, while average speeds rose from 15-20 km/h before the ban to 60-80 km/h.

Ho Chi Minh City government in Vietnam is targeting traffic congestion and gridlocks by implementing a range of measures including hikes in parking charges in central zones, banning private vehicles on some streets at particular times, and increasing registration charges for cars and motorcycles. Moreover, Mien Tay and Mien Dong bus terminals will be relocated to outskirt zones, while other bus terminals will be improved and enlarged.

GPS Insight, a provider of GPS fleet tracking solutions for commercial and municipal fleets, has announced a joint-marketing agreement with SpeedGauge, in which select SpeedGauge services, such as speeding event analysis, will be made available to GPS Insight customers. GPS Insight has also licensed certain SpeedGauge patent rights and will make this functionality available to customers in the near future.

Leading traffic information software provider Gewi has announced that the popular TIC product now is available as "TIC as a data service". The company says this will allow its customers to be able to test their TPEG over HTTP enabled navigation devices.

In the context of a wider relationship between Safran and Finmeccanica, Morpho (Safran group) and Selex Elsag (Finmeccanica Group) have signed a “Partnership Framework Agreement” for development of commercial and industrial operations in the field of road enforcement and safety equipment which could lead to a joint venture.

According to the Arval, the car rental division of French banking group, BNP Paribas, the interest of Spanish companies in adding electric vehicles to their fleet has dropped 90 per cent in the past year, with just two per cent of companies expecting to opt for this type of vehicle before 2014. In 2010, 21 per cent said they would chose them. Hybrid cars also lost favour, with a 47 per cent drop in the number of companies intending to use them in their fleet from 30 per cent in 2010 to 16 per cent currently

ITS Australia president Dr Norm Pidgeon has described the forthcoming ITS 2011 Summit, being held from 20-22 September at the Gold Coast, as ITS Australia’s most ambitious project to date. Like the inaugural Summit in 2009, the ITS 2011 Summit will be a roll-up the sleeves working session with the theme Strategy into Action. It will bring together all ITS stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, manufacturers and users, including vehicle and component manufacturers, transport businesses and government bodies

Tests of a new drug testing kit are now being carried out by the police. A number of parallel trials are being carried out of the kits, which can detect a number of illegal drugs. The kits are manufactured in the UK and are already supplied to police forces in Australia and Italy, where they have been used successfully for some time. Should the UK trials prove successful the kits will be introduced across the country during early 2012.

The European Commission has published new statistics showing that EU road fatalities decreased by 11 per cent in 2010. However, country by country statistics show that the number of deaths still varies greatly across the EU. Most countries achieved double-digit reductions in the number of road deaths over the past year, including Luxembourg (33%), Malta (29%) Sweden (26%) and Slovakia (26%).

Point Grey, a specialist in advanced digital camera products, and AMD, the global semiconductor company, have jointly demonstrated uncompressed streaming HD video across USB 3.0 during AMD’s A-Series APU official launch event.