Highways previews the four-day Intertraffic event – the largest gathering of traffic and mobility professionals in the world.
The Intertraffic conference and exhibition, held on 20-23 March in Amsterdam, is a four-day juggernaut of an event, taking in some 30,000 visitors, covering 13 halls and giving the world a comprehensive view of just how dynamic the traffic and transport sector is.
Exhibition manager Joyce de Winter says that despite its size: ‘Intertraffic Amsterdam is a hands-on place where you can not only see and learn about the latest developments in mobility but also experience them first hand through demonstrations in exhibition halls, outside the RAI Centre and through driving experiences on the roads of Amsterdam.’
A good place to start in this somewhat overwhelming landscape of new products and ideas is the Intertraffic Amsterdam Innovation Award. More than 60 high quality entries were narrowed down to the final 15, leaving three nominees in each of the five categories – infrastructure, traffic management, safety, parking and smart mobility. From the category winners, one entrant will ultimately be crowned this year’s overall winner, with the results announced at the opening ceremony of Intertraffic Amsterdam on Tuesday 20 March.
Among the big names up for an award is Dynniq for its CrossCycle product in the smart mobility category – one that is likely to impress the home crowd.
Dynniq says: ‘The CrossCycle app identifies cyclists sooner when they approach an intersection and gives them the green light more quickly. In addition to extending the green light for individual cyclists, the app also makes it possible to give priority to groups of cyclists. The app promotes the use of bicycles by making cycling fun again.’
Dynniq, with its business units WPS Parking and Energy, will also be hosting a seminar on parking and energy solutions on 22 March where it will analyse the issues around the potential future of off-street parking facilities with extensive, fast-charging systems.
AppyParking is shortlisted in the traffic management category with its Signs to Lines TRO Mapping solution. The company says: ‘Signs to Lines Mapping is the latest patent pending technology that creates the world’s most accurate map of all the paint on the street related to traffic and parking management.’
In the infrastructure category, Czech-based company CROSS Zlín is in with a chance with its OptiWIM sensor, which the company claims features ‘several world firsts’, most notably perhaps the ‘world’s only technology suitable for free-flow-toll-per-tonne’.
ParkHere GmbH is in the parking category with its self-powered parking sensor, which not only registers whether a car is parked in the spot but ‘is the first parking sensor that doesn’t need any kind of external supply’.
The company says: ‘It uses energy-harvesting to produce the energy it needs to send a signal to the base station which forwards the data to a cloud server. The sensor is expected to operate for more than 25 years without the need of any source of energy or maintenance.’
Portuguese company Sernis is up for awards in both parking and safety. In the safety arena it is hoping to win the day with its SR-90 product, described as an intelligent system for physical speed reduction of vehicles for controlled speed zones. The product involves a hardwired road stud, which can signal drivers using lights and elevation from the soil.
‘The control will be the result of an intelligent algorithm: the level of elevation and the LEDs colour will change accordingly to the speed that the car approaches the control area,’ the company says.
Outside of the product exhibition, the Intertraffic conference has a wide range of discussions and presentations designed to push the boundaries. One notable presentation category is ‘public private cooperation’, which includes a discussion on integrating smart mobility into traffic and transport models.
Rijkswaterstaat – the Dutch infrastructure authority – and Connecting Mobility are hosting the talk and arguing that ‘in order to support future decision-making in traffic and transport, it is essential that models include the changes smart mobility is expected to have on travel behaviour’.
‘Forecasts for future demands with regard to infrastructure, public transport, etc. are only useful if the effects of all new ways of travelling are included. In this session, we will present different views on how to integrate smart mobility in models, and all challenges ahead.’
Another interesting presentation is on the concept of the ‘car as a sensor’. The National Data Warehouse for Traffic Information in the Netherlands (NDW) is coordinating research on the use of mobile phone apps and other sources of floating data on behalf of the road authorities. The presentation will give an update on the latest developments in the field.