Skip to main content

Engineers and inventors of the future at World Congress

Tomorrow’s engineers, inventors and transport system planners showed their ideas, visions and solutions for dealing with current and future transport challenges to delegates at this week’s ITS World Congress. Displays outside the main exhibition area included the Young Students Design Your Future Challenge, and the Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge, with students from local primary and secondary schools working with Museum Victoria’s Scienceworks to present their ideas. Jonathan Shearer, Scienceworks’
October 12, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
Scienceworks’ Jonathan Shearer with kids from local schools
Tomorrow’s engineers, inventors and transport system planners showed their ideas, visions and solutions for dealing with current and future transport challenges to delegates at this week’s 6456 ITS World Congress. Displays outside the main exhibition area included the Young Students Design Your Future Challenge, and the Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge, with students from local primary and secondary schools working with Museum Victoria’s Scienceworks to present their ideas. Jonathan Shearer, Scienceworks’ STEM program co-ordinator, said the Design Your Future Challenge, asked students from four local schools to come up with ideas to make transport around Melbourne safer and more efficient.

“We had a whole bunch of good ideas, including proposals to redesign local bridges, robots directing traffic at dangerous intersections, maglev trains, and apps for more efficient transport planning.

“All these ideas have been presented at the concept stage during the World Congress,” said Shearer.

Also on show were working models from the Model Solar Vehicle Challenge, an annual national competition where students work with engineers to design and build their own solar powered vehicles. These displays and demonstrations are part of the World Congress every day until Friday.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Will mobile apps kick-start mobility pricing?
    January 5, 2016
    Thomas Hallauer from Ptolemus believes trials of connected road charging services will show the pay per mile concept will go much further than previously thought. Drivers are progressively becoming directly connected to the transport infrastructure and while the methods are changing, the innovation is really in the models rather than the technology.
  • Flexibility, interoperability is key to future traffic management
    February 3, 2012
    Jon Taylor of Faber Maunsell and Tabatha Bailey of Transport for London describe how an unusual mix of traffic practitioners, researchers and industry are working together to build new tools for the future. As we face higher expectations for managing congestion from both citizens and politicians, and as more and more data is becoming available from new sources, our traffic management challenge is changing.
  • Interview with new ITS America chairman David St Amant
    April 23, 2013
    David St Amant, incoming chair of ITS America, on the exciting and challenging road ahead for ITS
  • Rethink required to reduce road transport’s environmental impact
    March 15, 2016
    Against a background of a renewed focus on limiting the rise in average temperatures, Colin Sowman looks at a project that is taking a holistic approach to the environmental impact and safety of road transport. At the COP21 meeting in Paris last December, almost 200 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2°C) compared with pre-industrial levels. The transportation sector is a major contributor to the production of CO2, one of the main green