Urban Traffic Control

Peek Traffic and its distributor Northwest Signal have formed a new sales group to support Peek’s aggressive growth strategy. Northwest Signal manufactures and distributes its own range of traffic control products and software in the north-west US and represents Peek’s range of ATC controllers, VideoTrak IQ, software and traffic signals.

Austrian traffic technology group Swarco has acquired the APT group of companies, creating one of the largest traffic and parking management systems businesses in Europe.

NEC Corporation is providing a new operational control software module as part of its Cloud City Operations Centre to enable the city of Santander in Spain to automate the management of city infrastructure in real-time to minimise resource usage and reduce operational costs.

As part of a city-wide effort to modernise its infrastructure, the City of Palmdale, California has selected McCain’s Transparity TMS to update the City’s central traffic management software. Transparity TMS will replace McCain’s first-generation central software, which the City of Palmdale has been utilising since 2003.

Congestion on US Interstate highways added over US $9.2 billion in operational costs to the trucking industry in 2013, according to research released by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). ATRI, the trucking industry’s not-for-profit research institute, utilised motor carrier financial data along with billions of anonymous truck GPS data points to calculate congestion delays and costs on each mile of Interstate roadway. Delay totalled over 141 million hours of lost productivity, which equ

Devices used by traffic control systems are vulnerable to being hacked, according to computer security specialist IOActive. Hackers could gain complete control of these devices and cause traffic issues for the cities in the US, UK, France, Australia, China and beyond.

The Mexican government has unveiled a US$587 billion national infrastructure plan for 2014-18. "The national infrastructure plan includes 743 programs," said finance and public credit minister Luis Videgaray during the plan's presentation.

Growth in demand in its Eastern European market has led French electronics specialist Lacroix Group to enlarge its factory in Kwidzyn, Poland. The new factory will be inaugurated on 12 May and will be home to the company’s electronics division, as well as Lactoix Sofrel, specialising in remote monitoring of technical facility networks, and Lacroix Signalisation, which provides traffic management and control, traffic signs and street furniture for the transportation market.

According to the latest report by Global Industry Analysts, Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Global Strategic Business Report, the global market for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) is projected to reach US$26.3 billion by 2020, driven by continued rise in vehicular traffic and the need to regulate traffic flow, rising impetus for enhancing road safety, and escalating socio-environmental implications of traffic congestion.

Jakarta’s city administration is to begin work on building two dual-purpose tunnels by the end of the year in an effort to address increasingly dire conditions on the capital’s gridlocked, flood-prone streets.