Andrew Bardin Williams considers the effect of the ‘Name and Shame’ strategy adopted in Texas to encourage serial toll violators to pay up. It’s a tough time to be a scofflaw in the Lone Star State. Habitual toll violators - some with tens of thousands of unpaid tolls and fees - are being publically shamed into squaring their accounts with US toll agencies. In November 2013 the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) starting publishing a list of the state’s most egregious toll violators on its website.
As visitors to the Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
The story of Bangladesh has been nothing short of a miracle, including ITS mega-projects and entrepreneurial flair, as contributing editor James Foster discovered.
Overlaying a geographic information system with data from a new surveying system is paying dividends for Utah DOT. While building new roads tramways, metros and bicycle paths or installing smart systems to control traffic is the high-profile end of transportation planning and management, ensuring existing infrastructure and systems are serviceable and working is arguably more important. After all, at any given point the existing infrastructure will always carry more vehicles than new.