UTC

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is investing $2.5m in Sri Lanka-based ride-hailing company PickMe, whose taxi app allows users to request auto rickshaws and luxury cars. Amena Arif, IFC country manager for Sri Lanka and Maldives, says the country has the potential for a digital start-up ecosystem but has been held back by a lack of global funding. IFC says only 5% of start-ups get cash-for-equity seed funding to raise their first significant round of venture capital. IFC’s venture cap

Transportation company Nauto has launched its Prevent solution to help eliminate distracted driving by alerting motorists when their eyes have strayed off the road for too long. The company hopes to reduce accidents and collisions - before the large-scale arrival of autonomous vehicles. A report by TechCrunch says the device will send a voice notification if motorists are distracted for more than five seconds and are driving at 60mph. An alarm will follow if the user's attention has not returned to drivi

Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS) has entered an R&D agreement with the iMove Cooperative Research Centre to improve traffic flows in Melbourne, Australia. The $55m government-funded project will consider the interaction of all transport modes to identify blockages in the management of an integrated multi-modal system. The two-year initiative - called the Implementation of a Multimodal Situational Awareness and Operations Regime Evaluation Platform – sees CTS collaborating with the University of Melbou

Applied Information is to provide traffic signal priority for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) buses in a bid to make bus transit faster than car journeys in the city. Applied’s Glance Smart Cities Supervisory technology will be used at 23 intersections along Atlanta’s Campbellton Road Smart Corridor. The initiative, which also involves system integrator Temple, will be implemented between the Oakland City MARTA station and I-285 – an interstate loop which encircles Atlanta – and

Toyota Motor Corporation is investing $1 billion in Grab Holdings, the Singapore-based ride-hailing platform provider. Grab, which has merged with Uber in south-east Asia, offers services which use a variety of transport modes, from bicycles and shuttle buses to cars and taxis. The companies say Toyota’s investment means they will also “strengthen and expand their existing collaboration in the area of connected cars, to drive the adoption of new mobility solutions across south-east Asia”.

Singapore has the third-highest population density in the world and the numbers are continuing to grow. The government knows that transit is vital: David Crawford investigates the city state’s Smart Nation strategy. Transport is the most important of the five domains identified as the pillars of Singapore's far-reaching Smart Nation strategy, launched in November 2014 by prime minister Lee Hsien Loong with the aim of reaching fulfilment by 2024. Roads account for 12% of the island republic's 719km2 land ar

German tunnel sensor monitoring manufacturer DURAG has taken a 50% stake in the Austrian tunnel air and lighting monitoring company JES Elektrotechnik. JES, based in Hallein, Austria, manufactures and sells environmental monitoring solutions for transport infrastructure applications such as tunnels, underground car parks and road weather stations. JES also sells sensors from manufacturers such as DURAG. Its markets are mainly in German-speaking countries worldwide and it also carries out maintenance on b

Carmakers using the word ‘autonomous’ are lulling UK drivers into a false sense of security, says a new report. The warning from Thatcham Research and the Association of British Insurers (ABI) follows reports of drivers crashing because they are over-reliant on technology that is not fully autonomous. The partnership is now calling for manufacturers and legislators to clarify the capability of vehicles sold with technology that does some driving on behalf of motorists. Thatcham’s latest paper, Assi

Mobility analytics company StreetLight Data has launched its Multimodal Measurement Initiative (M2 Initiative) to measure the way various modes of travel interact. The company says it is developing new analytics that describe the behaviour of each transportation mode individually. The project will assess the interaction between trips made by personal vehicles, public transit, walking, biking, commercial trucks and gig economy trips made by on-demand rideshare and delivery drivers. For the first phase

The UK’s Alan Turing Institute and the Toyota Mobility Foundation are partnering in an 18-month project which they say is intended to modernise traffic management. They will collaborate with data providers and government managers to look at the way cities could run in future. Potential outcomes include the integration of an artificial intelligence (AI) system for traffic control, a platform for interactive data manipulation to monitor traffic behaviour and developing mechanisms for fleet operators and ci