UTC

In a bid to improve Sydney's roads and congestion, Australia's Federal and New South Wales governments are to jointly fund a project to equip the full length of the state's M4 motorway with technology which will improve traffic flows and ease congestion along this vital part of Sydney's road network. The US$17 million project will provide the M4 with an electronic freeway management system consisting of variable speed limit sign, entry ramp signalling, CCTV, digital traveller information signs, and signs ad

Econolite has announced that Lee County, Florida, has harnessed the travel time module of its Centracs advanced transportation management system (ATMS) for the deployment of its BlueToad (Bluetooth Travel-time Origination and Destination) system to actively monitor travel times and road speeds. The ATMS was installed in 2011, as part of Lee County’s signal re-timing project for which the county’s DoT received an ‘A’ grade in the 2012 National Transportation Operations Coalition (NTOC) National Traffic Signa

An extensive programme to upgrade Northampton County Council's current traffic systems is about to get underway. Siemens will initially provide Northamptonshire in the UK with the latest PC SCOOT UTC system and replace the existing Prefect system with the company’s recently launched InView hosted fault management solution. Subsequent phases will see the swapping out of all existing analogue TC12 outstations for the latest Siemens UTMC compliant UG405 outstations and ultimately the migration to a new hosted

A series of road tunnels is taking shape to help relieve Istanbul from crippling road congestion, with an extensive array of safety and management systems operating from a single ITS platform. Nino Sehagic reports. Traffic in Istanbul has historically been described simply as jammed. Severe congestion and chaotic use of available road space are characteristics of a city of more than one and a half million cars. Istanbul’s existing road network could not cope and was in urgent need of expansion, leading the

The State of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has selected TransCore ITS to provide its TransSuite traffic control system for managing and centralised monitoring of existing traffic signals statewide. The TransSuite system will be the cornerstone of Caltrans’ strategy to proactively manage traffic through the monitoring of traffic signals and traffic conditions at state-operated intersections. As part of the project, TransCore ITS will develop an interface to the Caltrans controller firmwa

Can the future be predicted? With what accuracy can ‘predictive analytics’ be used to help anticipate demand? This is a relatively new science for transportation and over the next few years it will be interesting to see to what extent it can solve some common problems. Transportation authorities may be close to finding the golden chalice that is accurate prediction of how traffic will behave as congestion occurs. Predictive algorithms are not necessarily new, but the coming together of conditions needed for

The Danish city of Aarhus, which has the second-largest urban area in Denmark after Copenhagen, has chosen BlipTrack to measure travel time and traffic flow following eight months of thorough testing of the system. The results showed that Blip Systems’ small and non-intrusive Bluetooth solution could offer the same exact information as alternative and more expensive solutions.

Joshua Schank has no illusions when it comes to what he and the Bipartisan Policy Center are suggesting in Performance Driven: New Vision for US Transportation Policy. Released in June of this year, this major report (see Sidebar, 'The Shift in Thinking') advocates no less than a root-and-branch overhaul of the way in which the US transportation system is run - how money is allocated and how the beneficiaries of that funding are selected. As its name suggests, Schank and his colleagues are urging senior US

Deryk Whyte provides an overview of how the New Zealand Transport Agency's InfoConnect concept was developed. Historically, the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) (formerly Transit New Zealand) has faced challenges in communicating effectively with road users, its customers, about highway-related events or incidents in a timely, accurate manner. Prior to 2007, Transit relied on a third-party organisation to collect and disseminate national road condition information. This often resulted in incomplete infor

Bournemouth Borough Council on the south coast of England is the first local authority in the country to deploy Siemens InView, the company’s all new fault management system designed specifically for the traffic market. It allows traffic managers to keep a record of traffic monitoring and control equipment and to track the status of that equipment, including maintenance issues, running costs and equipment reliability. Cloud based, with a web browser interface, InView offers fault reporting and asset managem