Workshops on NeTEx – the technical standard for exchanging public transport information as XML documents – are being held in London and Sheffield. The free events, run by the Department for Transport and Traveline Information Limited, mark the next stage of NeTEx engagement. They will offer a review of the final UK NeTEx profile, what it could mean for your organisation and how it will help to deliver the DfT's Bus Open Data Programme.  These stakeholder workshops are aimed at

The Landor LINKS Annual Survey of Mobility as a Service is now in its third year. Whatever sector of transport you work in, MaaS is now having an impact either as a planner, providing public transport, bike share, car hire, leasing, payments, operational support, TRANStech. We'd like to hear from you, so please complete the survey to gauge how MaaS – and our hopes and fears for it – are developing. Take part in the survey today Last year we had more interest from the automotive se

The winners of the 2019 everywoman in Transport & Logistics Awards have been revealed. Over the past 12 years the everywoman awards have championed women in the transport and logistics industries, showcasing and celebrating the sectors’ most exceptional role models. The winners were announced at Grosvenor House in London on 13 June. While many of the winners were drawn from the passenger transport, infrastructure and freight sectors, the world of walking was also recognised at this y

Our contributors to Data & Modelling 2019, and this year’s cohort of speakers at Modelling World, all agree that as technological advances and evolving social trends intersect to drive a period of unprecedented change, data and modelling professionals must raise their game in order to take advantage of new opportunities.  Modellers and data professionals will play a key role in ‘Deciding and Providing’ for our mobility futures. As predatory tech an

Modelling World 2019, 4 & 5 June, Birmingham: Supported delegate places for students Our event partner Jacobs is kindly sponsoring 10 full delegate places for students who are interested in sharing ideas about the key issues to be discussed at Modelling World. Please apply, by 28 May, with a CV and top two preferences for morning and afternoon sessions to: juliana.orourke@landor.co.uk Jacobs will ask all student ambassadors to gather at lunchtime at the event reception desk for a group ph

Corethree, Europe’s leading mobile ticketing and data insights provider, today (21 May 2019) announced that it has reached an unprecedented milestone of one hundred million mobile tickets sold on behalf of its transport operator partners; testament to the growing popularity of mobile ticketing technologies and how m-tickets are becoming the default choice for consumers to travel and experience the smart city.  Corethree provides m-ticketing and cutting-edge data insights to some of

Transport for London is to start capturing depersonalised wi-fi connection data from millions of London Underground passengers’ phones from early July.       TfL ran a four-week pilot of capturing wi-fi data in 2016 and has developed the system in-house. When a device such as a smart phone has wi-fi enabled, it continually searches for a wi-fi network by sending out a unique identifier – known as a Media Access Control address – to nearby routers.  TfL sa

Aimsun has a long working history with TfL, and its software is already licensed to TfL through the city’s Strategic Modelling Framework and the Operational Modelling Frameworks, which were put in place back in 2015 and recently extended to 2020. The idea behind this current project is not only to consolidate existing models into an integrated, multi-level platform for modelling the city’s transport — with all the efficiency, consistency and cost reduction that this implies &m

Immense Simulations, the intelligent mobility software provider, today announced that it has secured $4.6m in Series A funding. The investment will aid the continued growth and development of its AI-driven ‘Simulation as a Service’ platform, which is disrupting traditional transportation modelling. The Series A funding was co-led by global technology investor, Amadeus Capital Partners, one of Europe’s most active AI investors according to Pitchbook, and Global Brain Corporatio

My words this time are directed squarely, and I trust fairly, at transport practitioners.  They’re prompted by the fact that, every year since 2011, May has been celebrated by Living Streets as National Walking Month. Living Streets is, of course, the UK charity for everyday walking and its purpose is to achieve a better walking environment and inspire people to walk more. That ought to be a doddle, no? After all, barring a very few exceptions, everyone walks. And walking’s d

Modelling World, now in its 14th year, is the UK & Europe's best attended, longest-running and biggest conference / annual exhibition for transport and pedestrian modelling professionals, advisory and strategic modellers, data scientists and transport economists. In 2019, we will be introducing an afternoon session, prior to the main conference, to explore the implications and potential of Digital Twins. It will be led by Mark Enzer, Chair, Digital

We’re seeing these developments on the ground now, changing the way people travel. Sometimes it’s trial on a small scale with local introductions of new services across a limited area. The flexible on demand driven bus service in launched by Arriva started in an area of Sittingbourne just 4 miles wide and 6 miles long. A single bus route converted by TransDev to ‘pay for how far you travel’ measured by Bluetooth beacons. One Royal Mail depot trialling electric cargo trike

Network Rail is re-examining a rail capacity scheme in South Wales that was started in 2015 but “paused” because of cost increases. The Welsh Government earmarked £38m for the Ebbw Vale frequency enhancement scheme in 2015 to enable Cardiff-Ebbw Vale frequencies to be increased from hourly to half-hourly. The project required the installation of seven miles of additional track along the Ebbw Vale branch line, which reopened in 2008.  Network Rail rapidly spent £28

Local authorities can radically improve their transport system by increasing the use of shared modes, especially active ones, but need operational and regulatory guidance. CoMoUK is supporting local authorities by bringing together stakeholders, including the DfT, to help deliver shared mobility goals, a process that will kick off at the Shared Transport Masterclass in Leicester on 22 February Cities in the UK are on the precipice of an upcoming revolution in the way we provide transport. The p

Advances in technology may provide new opportunities in metropolitan railway finance, says Joseph Potvin, Executive Director, Xalgorithms Foundation It is common knowledge that commercial and residential properties within an easy walk of metropolitan train stations are in relatively greater demand, which tends to be reflected in their significantly higher lease and sale values. This mobility premium has long been the basis for so-called Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) initiatives.&nbs

Campaign for Better Transport has called on the Government to invest £4.8 billion in expanding the railway network to reach the most disconnected and disadvantaged communities. In a new report, The case for expanding the rail network, it outlines how a national reopening programme would initially create 33 new rail lines with 72 new stations, allowing an additional 20 million rail passenger journeys a year by bringing over 500,000 people within walking distance of a train station. It

Zipcar, a company that helped define the sharing economy, has released the findings of its 2018 Impact Report. For the first time, the report comprehensively captures key findings gathered over Zipcar’s eighteen years of mobility leadership. The findings, combined with objective third-party research, offer tangible evidence that car sharing continues to provide both members, and the cities they live in, with significant and distinct social and environmental benefits, at a time when new mob

Shared mobility modes have great potential to address congestion and poor air quality challenges, but the practical delivery of an integrated shared mobility strategy is complex. The Shared Transport Masterclass on February 22 will bring together operators, local authorities and potential mobility users to take the first steps in creating a practical framework, based on 'mobility pledges', that can guide the set-up for successful shared mobility. The mobility pledges are rooted in work tha

EU partners will continue to work over the next three years to raise the profile of shared transport solutions as part of the SHARE-North project. Speakers from project members CoMoUK and SHARE-North will be speaking at the Shared Transport Masterclass on February 22 in Leicester. The aim of the SHARE-North project is to develop, implement, promote and assess shared transport options such as car clubs, bike share, ride sharing and other shared transport options. CoMoUK will focus on engagi

Since Bolloré’s pioneering Autolib car share service pulled out of Paris last year, Daimler’s Car2Go has delivered on its plan to offer 400 electric cars for free-floating sharing across the French capital. The service is simple: all you need is the app to grab a car2go anywhere in the home area of Paris. Parking is free in the designated zone.  More cars are to follow over the course of this year, says Car2Go's CEO Olivier Reppert, who considers Paris an ideal ground fo

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) smartphone ticketing should be available to Wales and Borders rail passengers by April 2021. The facility will not necessarily involve ITSO Ltd, which manages the ITSO specification for inter-operable smart ticketing schemes. Government body Transport for Wales has published the grant agreement for the Wales and Borders operator and development partner (ODP) contract, awarded to KeolisAmey in June. The agreement includes deadlines for the development of smart ticketing on t

The title of the workshop on the 15 October was ‘Supporting the application of WebTAG and making it more user friendly’. It began with a discussion of the results of a recent online survey about WebTAG run by the DfT, which provided some useful context.  The spread of responses may be revealing in itself: of the 90 respondents, the majority were working in consultancy (56 per cent), followed by local and central government (30 per cent). Only 2 per cent of respondents were from

The DfT is currently involved in the assessment and/or delivery of schemes and programmes such as Crossrail 2, High Speed 2 and the Oxford to Cambridge Expressway that are expected to have transformational impacts on local and regional economies. Although a scheme’s size is not a pre-requisite for it to have transformational impacts; indeed a relatively small scheme can unlock land for development, the Department’s future work programme has raised the challenges of capturing such imp

In the third of our series of reports on workshops hosted by the DfT to explore ways of improving its WebTAG modelling and appraisal tools, Paulo Anciães summarises the discussion on the relationship between transport, people and places. In June, the DfT published a consultation on priorities for a new ‘Appraisal and Modelling Strategy’, setting out its vision for developing modelling and appraisal tools over the next five years. A workshop was held in London on 27 September

Paul Hammond, global practice leader for economics at Mott MacDonald, an event partner for Smarter Travel LIVE!, echoed the calls from Mayors Rotherham and Burnham for better integrated transport infrastructure across the North, and is ready to support delivery. 'As many of the presenters at Smarter Travel LIVE! pointed out, the challenges and solutions are myriad and should not be seen in isolation. Active travel, for example, is a key aspect of a healthy community and an integral part of the

The 6th Annual Smarter Travel LIVE! Conference, hosted by Merseytravel & Liverpool City Region (LCR) on October 16 and 17, attracted more than 600 delegates from across the UK and beyond. Steve Rotheram, Metro Mayor of Liverpool City Region, and Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester Mayor, both gave keynotes, stressing their commitment to ongoing devolution and the delivery of a fully integrated, accessible and clean transport network linking key towns and cities across the North (see news pages)

In the run-up to the publication of expressions of interest for the future Oxfordshire Strategic Traffic Model (OSM) on October 23, Smarter Travel LIVE! hosted a workshop session with Oxfordshire County Council, innovation hub MoBox and Oxford-based im23, the smarter mobility agency, to outline new ways for local authorities and the tech community to collaborate. In a first for UK local authorities, Oxfordshire County Council is using its OSM procurement to demonstrate how to leverage innovation

The last issue covered the LTT seminar on the future of transport investment appraisal, which raised wide-ranging issues about professional practice and the way transport projects are looked at in their wider context by other parties. The discussion included current DfT consultation on potential revisions to WebTAG – the DfT’s guidance on preparing the economic case for transport investment. The DfT has also been holding a series of specialist theme-based workshops. Tom Van Vuren (pi

Motorists will soon be to avoid roadworks when planning their journeys thanks to a new digital system funded by the government. The Department for Transport (DfT) is investing up to £10m in Street Manager, a digital planning service due to launch next year. It is anticipated that the service will make more consistent, accurate data on street works available to drivers. Unlike current data on roadworks, which is often out-of-date and incomplete, Street Manager will generate real-time data

Dundee City Council has appointed firms to deliver a range of mobility services in the city, which could provide the foundation for a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) product.  Neil Gellatly, Dundee’s head of roads and transportation, told LTT the initiatives were all part of the city’s Mobility Innovation Living Laboratory (MILL) project, which aims to deliver new services for citizens while enabling mobility firms to develop and test their products in a live setting. The council

Researchers have published a comprehensive report on private- and public-sector big data policies affecting transport in EU countries and abroad. The travel behaviours and transport preferences of city dwellers are changing. Transport researchers and policymakers are therefore faced with numerous challenges as they strive to create efficient, safe and sustainable transportation systems, notes CORDIS, the EU Research and innovation news service. In order to address these issues, the EU

Now in its 3rd year, the Awards will showcase the ways in whiich people's lives are being improved through cost-effective, clean and integrated transport provision across towns and cities. These awards celebrate both the positive impact that smarter travel projects can deliver, and the professionals who lead them. Whoever you are, whatever your project or service, everyone has a chance of winning a Smarter Travel Award. You don’t have to have the biggest budgets, the sexiest product or th

ArrivaClick is an on-demand minibus service that takes multiple passengers heading in the same direction and books them on a shared vehicle, with the aim of tackling air quality issues and congestion. Enabling people to move out of private cars with the offer of convenient and comfortable shared journeys is a key driver for the project. ArrivaClick in Liverpool will become operational later in the summer. There are no fixed routes, with journeys determined by where passengers want to go wit

Colin Brader explains Integrated Transport Planning’s approach to consultancy. “We don’t see ourselves as a commercially-driven organisation, ever. I’m quite adamant that we shouldn’t be like that. We’re philosophically driven, we want to achieve things, and we’ve always managed to see the commercial side following and supporting that. We’ve been profitable every single year of our existence. During the recession we came down to a few per cent and

Updating the DfT’s national transport model has led to a big reduction in trips reported in the 2015 base year. Consultants Atkins and RAND Europe were commissioned to update and recalibrate the transport demand model (NTMv2R), which is a core component of the modelling framework used to forecast changes in personal travel by all modes.  Atkins reports that use of version 7 of the National Trip End Model (NTEMv7), rather than its predecessor NTEMv6.2, has led to a large reduction in

If you’re James Brown, of course, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World (at least, that’s the title of his 1966 hit). And, while I wouldn’t want to build a philosophical position on that song’s lyrics, many of its words are pertinent to my theme. Firstly, as many of you will know, Mr Brown did also point out that this ‘man’s world’ would be ‘nothing without a woman’. Secondly, as hardly anyone knows, the song was jointly wri

Brighton's bike share scheme (BTN BikeShare) is to expand with 120 new bikes and nine new hubs, mostly in Hove.  The scheme started last September with 450 bikes at 51 sites and, in the nine months since, has attracted 35,000 subscribers. Back in March, after gaining more than 22,000 users in just six months, the scheme became the biggest in the UK outside of London, and by the end of May there had been 213,000 rentals and more than 400,000 miles cycled, according to the Brighton and Hove N

Councils wanting to reduce pollution from toxic gases such as nitrogen dioxide from traffic on our roads must consider how compliance can be cost-effectively achieved for Clean Air Zones (CAZ) and Low Emission Zones (LEZ). There are several practical steps that can be taken by extracting greater value from limited resources by utilising existing assets more effectively. CCTV enforcement and traffic management systems are now routinely deployed by councils to capture civil traffic contraventions

Following the release of the first fleet of proof of concept vehicles in Christchurch in 2017, along with trials across NZ and Australia with other partners and technologies, HMI Technologies (HMI), a New Zealand / Australian-based Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) innovator and a member of ITS UK, has developed a self driving & self-learning AV technology company called Ohmio Automotion. HMI has been a player in the ITS industry for more than 15 years and, based on its experience wor

Anna Delveccio, who started her transport engineering career as a teenager, has received the top honour at the 2018 FTA everywoman in Transport & Logistics Awards.  Launched 11 years ago, the awards programme celebrates women transforming transport and logistics in the UK. The winners included women working for transport organisations including Heathrow Airport, Royal Mail, Merseytravel and Transport for London.  The Woman of the Year Award was presented to Anna Delvecchio, Comme

“When I hear someone say they have a data platform I reach for my shotgun,” Professor Jonathan Raper declared earlier this year. Raper was in a Q&A session with Graham Hanson, the DfT’s Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) policy lead, at the Catch! showcase event at the Future Cities Catapult in Clerkenwell Green. Raper reflects mounting concern amongst transport data experts that people have a misplaced understanding of what data platforms should provide to qualify as use

Transport for London is pitching to deliver more transport project work on behalf of boroughs, undertaking activities that are currently done by council officers or consultants. It is also advising boroughs against using “costly consultants” to prepare bids for a TfL funding stream. TfL’s offer is set out in a letter sent to boroughs last week by Penny Rees, head of network sponsorship in the surface transport directorate.  “I am pleased to confirm that we have ded

Transport for London has appointed WSP consultant Helen Murphy to lead a new consulting directorate, whose revenues will be reinvested in the capital’s transport network. Murphy moves from her position as WSP’s UK operations director, to lead a new directorate known as TfL Consulting (LTT 15 Sep 17). Her job title will be director of commercial consulting and international operations.   Graeme Craig, TfL’s director of commercial development, said: “Our role in deli

Most of us played with Lego as children, but I was more likely to leave lines of toy cars around the house, which is somewhat ironic given my current line of work. But I still play with Lego today, as I tidy up my children's efforts when they’re not looking. But I think the two are linked in my line of work.  I like to imagine transport models in a similar way: a number of blocks that are interconnected to produce a replica of how people and goods move around our real cities. All the

How is the advent of big data influencing the way we build our models? How can Virtual Reality allow us to better visualise, and thus better understand, pedestrian experience in crowds? Driven by the necessity to develop ever larger and accurate models, Atkins' pedestrian modelling team has explored an innovative approach that involved the adoption of both traditional survey methods as well as the monitoring of WiFi-enabled devices. Virtual Reality was also adopted as a tool to aid the design pr

CAVs and MaaS will radically change the mobility landscape of the next decade. But they are not 'easy to deploy' silver bullets. The future of modelling and policy making looks set to get very interesting, says Luis Willumsen, Director, Kineo Mobility Analytics Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) have been proposed as game changers in transport in the next decade. Indeed, the combination of both, a MaaS system using CAVs, will probably reduce costs by half

Over the past few months I have seen repeated references to the image of the Gartner Analytic Value Escalator, or the Gartner Analytic Continuum. I haven’t found an original reference, and the image is sometimes drawn slightly differently, but the message is always the same: adding value to data, moving from hindsight via insight to foresight, by progressing from Descriptive to Diagnostic to Predictive to Prescriptive Analytics. There’s a good version of the image here Isn’t t

A cycle hire scheme being launched in Edinburgh will feature a hybrid lock system so that users can choose between dockless parking or leaving bikes at docking stations. Public service provider Serco will run the scheme for Transport for Edinburgh (TfE), with the first bikes set to be in operation by September. Serco also runs the cycle hire scheme in the capital for Transport for London. The Edinburgh fleet will comprise the same Pashley Cycles currently being rolled out in London, although i

The 36 finalists in the 2018 FTA everywoman in Transport & Logistics Awards have been announced. Now in its eleventh year, the awards programme celebrates the achievements of women in the UK’s transport and logistics industry.  This year’s finalists include women working for transport organisations including Heathrow Express, Merseytravel, Network Rail, Transport for London and West Midlands Trains. The UK transport and logistics industry employs around 2.4 million people.

Transport policy and planning approaches the question of future travel demand in too rigid a way, failing to reflect recent trends or the huge uncertainties surrounding forecasting, according to the Commission on Travel Demand.  The Commission has just completed a 12-month inquiry into future travel demand and its implications for policy and planning. The final report was launched at an event in London last week sponsored by consultant Jacobs. It makes ten recommendations (see panel for an

Changes in how we plan our transport networks for the future are urgently needed, says the first report from the Commission on Travel Demand We need to start planning now for how we travel around England in the coming decades, according to a major new report. It explains how, as a population, we travel substantially less today than we did one or two decades ago. Overall, we make fewer trips, spend less time travelling, and travel fewer miles.  But there are noticeable differences in our t

The West Midlands Combined Authority has an ambitious agenda to build a healthier, happier, better connected and more prosperous region in the broadest sense of ‘build’ – not just the urban fabric and infrastructure, but also in our industrial capability, community well-being and environmental resources.   When we talk about strategic transport modelling we mean modelling that connects transport forecasting to the higher-level aims outlined by the Mayor: economic pro

Academia may appear civilised to outsiders but the rivalries and feuds seen in other walks of life can be just as prevalent in universities. Even so, it’s unusual when they spill out in papers published in academic journals.  That, however, is what is about to happen in the subject of transport project management, with two Australian-based academics having had a paper accepted for publication that reads like a demolition job on the research of Bent Flyvbjerg, the BT professor and cha

What we have at the moment, says Mike Waters, Director of Policy, Strategy and Innovation at TfWM, is a very good, sophisticated, and comprehensive strategic transport model, created in collaboration with our metropolitan districts and Highways England. The architecture for this model was really cutting edge 15 years ago, he adds, and TfWM and the model supplier have continued to develop it over the years. ‘The current model is really useful for helping with local plans, large land use pla

Britain is awash with innovative transport products and services, either in development or here right now. Most of the innovation is focused on big cities, where commercial operators are most likely to receive good returns on their investments and where public authorities have the resources and scale to plan and deliver new products and services over sustained periods. Consequently, many city dwellers have more travel choices than ever before, with bikeshare, car clubs and app-based ride hailin

The Campaign for Better Transport has announced it is looking to appoint a new chief executive office to replace Stephen Joseph, who will be stepping down at the end of Autumn. Joseph was appointed executive director of Transport 2000 in 1988, the same year Michael Palin was appointed President, and received an OBE in 1996 for services to transport and the environment. Transport 2000 changed its name to Campaign for Better Transport in 2007. During his 30-year tenure with the charity, Joseph

Following entrance to multiple markets in the United States, Chariot  is launching its daily commuter shuttle service in London, to 'make getting around the city easier'. Chariot London is the latest of Ford’s European initiatives, accelerating the development of its smart mobility technologies. Throughout 2018, Ford will be trialling a 20-strong fleet of plug-in hybrid Transit Custom vans in the UK capital as part of the “Cleaner Air for London" initiative supported by Tra

One dividend from the rapid developments in information technology has been the emergence of the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in the form of the integration of multi-modal information, ticketing and payment systems. The idea of integrated transport systems is long-established but has often been frustrated by events. Yet MaaS apparently offers the opportunity for a new level of seamless door-to-door mobility by using just one platform and a single payment. The service can therefore com

To move, we occasionally need to stop. Indeed, we could look at door-to-door / end-to-end journeys by designing how we stop (to change from one bit of the journey to another) as much as how we travel. Transport hubs and interchanges are all about designing hiatuses between journey segments. Whilst we usually think of these as the grander multi-modal cheek-to-cheek interchanges, the humble bus stop is an intermodal interchange hub too. So far, so obvious. But in the emerging models of mobility a

Five parts of England are to explore the use of air-borne drones in their areas.  Bradford, London, Preston, Southampton and the West Midlands have been selected to take part in the Flying High Challenge run by UK charity and global innovation foundation Nesta and the Government’s innovation agency Innovate UK.  Transport for London said:  “The capital has the busiest and most heavily regulated airspace in the UK, and the Nesta challenge will allow the city to have s

Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) found reduced speed limits have led to a reduction in the number of fatal, serious and slight injuries from road traffic collisions - including statistically significant reductions in average traffic speeds of 2.7mph. - equating to estimated cost savings of over £15 million per year. Walking and cycling across Bristol has increased, both among children travelling to school and adults travelling to work. The introduction of

The next generation of data and modelling pioneers will be given the chance to present and exhibit at Modelling World 2018, 6th June at Edgbaston Cricket Ground, Birmingham.  Technological developments and disruptive business models will have a significant impact on how people and goods move around in coming years, and Modelling World’s aim is to help policy makers deal with uncertainty around the future of transport.   Each year, the data and modelling community gathers a

A new Institute for Government (IfG) report has targeted three key aspects of policy to improve infrastructure decision-making in the UK. Over the past year, the Institute for Government has explored how the UK can improve infrastructure policymaking in areas including transport, energy, flood defences, digital communication, waste and water. Pulling together the findings of our work, this report identifies how competing needs and perspectives can be balanced to improve three vital aspects of

The pace of technology-driven innovation from the private sector in shared transportation services, vehicles, and networks is rapid, accelerating, and filled with opportunity. At the same time, city streets are a finite and scarce resource. These principles, produced by a working group of international NGOs led by Robin Chase, and including c40, ICLEI and World Resources Institute, are designed to guide urban decision-makers and stakeholders toward the best outcomes for all. Ride-sharing start

Increasing traffic congestion across mega cities and large urban centres, coupled with the resulting loss to the economy, is driving the need for more efficient modes of urban transportation. Flying cars are being explored as an alternative form of future mobility, making use of the underutilised domestic airspace.  Flying cars are set to disrupt the personal mobility space of the future with at least ten early entrants expected to launch various versions of flying cars by 2022. OEMs and o

An artificial intelligence system designed to help clear the best route for ambulances is set to have its first live trial in Oxford this year. Computer modelling in Liverpool indicates that the AI could reduce response times by 40%, but the Oxford trial will be the first live test on the road. It is due to start by the end of the spring and is expected to last a year. Ambulance services across the UK are required to meet 75% of life-threatening cases within 8 minutes to guarantee NHS funding an

Modelling World is the UK & Europe's longest running, best-attended and biggest annual exhibition and conference for transport and pedestrian modelling professionals.  This must-attend annual fixture is the highlight of the modelling calendar and attracts more than 300 attendees each year.  The 13th Annual Modelling World Conference & Exhibition for data and modelling professionals will return to its roots in Birmingham on Wednesday 6 June at Edgbaston Cricket Ground

The Cooperative Automotive Research Network (CARNET)* has implemented a cutting-edge simulation environment for the Barcelona Metropolitan Area in the form of The Virtual Mobility Lab. The aim of the lab is to show how it can analyse and assess the impact of smart mobility projects in Barcelona, and how the results can be extrapolated before the implementation of a pilot test. The new model will support those who make decisions on mobility policies, transport operators and new companies that are

After a dramatic decline during the financial crisis in the latter part of the last decade, the UK motor vehicle industry has made a strong recovery. November 2016 saw a 9.6% increase in the number of cars produced in the UK compared to the previous year and a record number of cars were exported during 2016 – representing 77.3% of total production. Like the rest of the manufacturing sector, the automotive industry is currently in the process of digitalisation, a journey that introduces th

The Bus Services Act 2017 enshrines open data provision for the bus industry in law – but what this means in practical terms for local authorities and the industry has yet to be set out. The legislation aims to help passengers find timetables, fares and routes through the release of open data. However, the Open Data Institute believes bus operators have a patchy appreciation of, engagement with and awareness of open data – many still don’t know what it is, how it differs from o

A new report from the MaasLab at UCL, commissioned by TfL, provides insights about Londoners’ attitudes towards car-ownership, shared mobility services and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as well as an impact assessment about a potential introduction of MaaS in the city. Londoners’ attitudes towards car-ownership and Mobility-as-a-Service: Impact assessment and opportunities that lie ahead is available online.  According to the report, at least 35% of regular car users stated that

Passengers in Boston’s Seaport district were able to experience self-driving rides on the Lyft network in nuTonomy vehicles from this week, announced nuTonomy. Earlier this year, nuTonomy and Lyft announced a partnership focused on bringing nuTonomy vehicles to the Lyft network in Boston. As the pilot progresses, select Boston passengers in Seaport area will be matched with nuTonomy self-driving vehicles when they request rides through the Lyft app. Our partnership with Lyft has two goals

A new drone challenge has been launched in the UK that will work with five cities to explore if and how drone technology could be used to support local needs. The Flying High Challenge, run by innovation foundation Nesta together with Innovate UK, will consider how drones could assist cities with their emergency services, buildings maintenance, and traffic, environmental and pollution monitoring.  Drone technology is advancing rapidly. UK cities now have a unique opportunity to shape this

Groupe Renault has produced a 1,000 cars enabled to participate in a European trial of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies. The Méganes will be provided to fleet customers taking part in SCOOP, an European Union pilot project for the deployment of cooperative intelligent transportation systems. The EU project facilitates trials of future vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) connectivity solutions under real-world driving conditions. SCOOP features a ran

The government hopes that its Industrial Strategy will place the UK at the forefront of development of autonomous vehicles (AVs), artificial intelligence (AI) and innovative approaches to shared mobility services. The draft Industrial Strategy, titled “Building a Britain Fit for the Future”, outlines how the government intends to boost businesses and worker productivity through investment in the skills, industries and infrastructure of the future. The White Paper confirms governmen

A £13.4m initiative to create a driverless transport testing area based in Greenwich, south-east London, is due to be up and running by spring 2019. Loughborough University (LU), the lead academic partner, has been awarded £500,000 as part of the project to develop a research programme enabling a real-world working testbed for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The Smart Mobility Living Lab: London will enable companies to trial their ideas, technology and services within co

Policies that seek to ban diesel and petrol cars from towns and cities is a knee-jerk reaction that ignores the efforts the automotive sector has made to produce less polluting vehicles, the president of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has said. Tony Walker used his speech at the SMMT’s annual dinner to address the issue of air quality. He focussed on the automotive sector’s efforts to invest in new technology and improve air quality in towns and cities.  

Ford has awarded some €30,000 (£27,000) to start-ups developing carpooling, navigation and podcast apps that will work on its in-car SYNC Connectivity System. The three winning apps in Ford’s Make It Driveable AppLink challenge each receiving €10,000 (£9,000) and an opportunity to work further with Ford. One of the winners, French-based Zify, app, mixes the world of the sharing economy and social media by filling empty car seats through connecting like-minded drive

Uber is to buy thousands of self-driving vehicles from Volvo between 2019 and 2021. Last year, Uber commenced testing prototypes made by Volvo in the US. The new non-exclusive agreement will see Volvo provide Uber with up to 24,000 of XC90 SUVs, which will serve as Uber’s autonomous driving-compatible base vehicles. Volvo says the vehicles incorporate all the necessary safety, redundancy and core autonomous-driving technologies that are required for Uber to add its own self-driving techn

Idealised visions of ‘The City of the Future’ are often presented as a symbol of progress. Whilst specific visions differ, the common element is the notion that in the future, the world’s most concentrated populations will occupy city environments where a digital blanket of sensors, devices and cloud-connected data are brought together to enhance the living experience for all. Smart concepts encompass key elements of what enable effective city ecosystems – from traffic c

The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has set out criteria for what drivers should expect from vehicles described as ‘automated’ and will task Thatcham Research with assessing any car marketed as ‘automated’ or ‘driverless’ against its 10 new criteria. The ABI’s announcement comes in reaction to the Automated and Electric Vehicle Bill, which is currently being considered by Parliament. Matthew Avery, director of research at Thatcham Research, said:

The Year of Engineering will see government and industry offer young people across the UK direct experiences of engineering in a push to tackle skills gap during 2018. Industry partners include companies in technology, healthcare, food production, energy, culture and transport. Partners such as Siemens, the Science Museum Group, Ocado, Usborne, BAE Systems and Crossrail have already pledged their support. Activities will include large-sale outreach program

The House of Commons Transport Committee is to look at how digital transport service platforms can enable the provision of Mobility as a Service, or MaaS. Digital platforms are increasingly being used to deliver a variety of transport services, ranging from niche online car and bike-sharing schemes to high profile taxi and private hire smartphone apps. The Transport Committee’s inquiry will look the potential of integrated, multi-mode MaaS apps, and ways of overcoming barriers to im

How can we separate the way we live our lives, the way we think, the way we move, and what we demand from our cities? All of these are intrinsically linked so it’s almost impossible to see which one is the driver of change. We are clearly in the midst of a seismic shift in respect of our demands for mobility and how we express them. This begs several questions: Is user demand driving change? Or technology? Or are we part of a master plan that seeks to define the way we use transport and ou

Nissan has demonstrated a prototype of its most advanced autonomous driving technology, planned for real-world use from 2020, on public roads in Tokyo. Nissan Motor Corporatti tested its next-generation ProPILOT technology on a modified Infinit Q50 sports sedan. The technology is designed to enables the vehicle to operate autonomously on urban roads and motorways. The prototype’s artificial intelligence uses input from 12 sonars, 12 cameras, 9mm-wave radars, six laser scanners and a high

Replacing private car traffic with new shared mobility services in urban areas can dramatically reduce the number of cars needed, significantly cut CO2 emissions and free public land for uses other than parking – without making it more difficult for users to get from door to door. This latest report from the International Transport Forum at the OECD, presented at Smarter Travel LIVE!, examines how the optimised use of new on-demand shared transport modes could change the future of mobilit

A new set of road use rules devised specifically for London is among the ideas proposed by an independent commission studying ways of making the capital’s highways work more efficiently. A ‘Movement Code’ is one of a series of policies proposed by the Commission on the Future of London’s Roads and Streets, convened by the Centre for London think-tank with the aim of developing new thinking on what can be done to manage the conflicting pressures on the capital's surface t

A project combining Ordnance Survey (OS) geospatial data with real-time air quality data will be used to highlight clean cycle routes in Britain’s cities. Air quality specialist EarthSense is producing citywide visualisations of air quality using a network of fixed and static air pollution sensors. When combined with OS’s open dataset of greenspaces, the EarthSense air quality models are designed to highlight areas of higher air pollution, which often along busy roads. It is en

Four projects across five locations have been awarded a total of £51m in funding for creating the environments needed to fully test connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology. The projects are the first to be funded from the government’s £100m Connected and Autonomous Vehicles testing infrastructure programme announced in November 2016 and will be matched by industry. The consortia selected selected in this first round are led by HORIBA MIRA, Millbrook Proving Ground, T

The MOVE_UK consortium has completed the first phase in its three-year fully autonomous vehicles research programme, which is intended accelerate the development of automated driving systems and make them intelligent and safe enough for the UK’s roads. Taking place in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, south-east London, the project has enabled the MOVE_UK consortium to develop a new validation method. It is anticipated that the validation method will reduce introduction time of highly autom

Smarter Travel LIVE! 2017 offers an expertly-crafted overview of need-to know people, initiatives, products and services – all in one place Resources are squeezed, time is precious and expectations upon local authorities and transport professionals increase.  The travelling public assumes that everything about their travel experience can, and should be, improved through the smart (and positive) implementation of technological innovation.  But is it really that easy? The t

Propelmee, an autonomous mobility software provider with specialist expertise in perception, will unveil its last mile delivery pod ‘Go4’ at the Smarter Travel show in Milton Keynes on 19 & 20 October. ‘Go4’ will appear on the ‘Street of the Future’ showcasing the first demonstration platform of Propelmee’s unique and highly robust autonomous mobility capabilities. ‘Go4’ will go live in a public demo in Cambridge later this year as a foot

A research consortium has unveiled three of the six self-driving cars that will feature in tests on public roads in Oxfordshire and between Oxford and London.  The DRIVEN project led by Oxbotica will test Level 4 automation, enabling the vehicle to drive itself most of the time without any human input. The project will culminate in multiple end-to-end journeys between Oxford and London in 2019.  Testing is underway at RACE’s autonomous vehicle test facility at the Culham Scienc

With less than six weeks to go before Smarter Travel LIVE! on 19 and 20 October, this year’s Smarter Travel LIVE! event is bringing together the widest ever range of key players to spark dialogue and debate. The convergence of digital technology with the travel and transport sector is catalysing the most radical and sophisticated possibilities in decades, and Smarter Travel LIVE! is the place to be for those who need to be engaged in what is happening across the UK and beyond. Such rapid

An Intelligent Mobility accelerator has been launched by the UK government to lead the development of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Meridian, a subsidiary of the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC), will operate as a mobility technology cluster designed to accelerate testing, development and adoption of CAVs within the UK and across international borders. Supported by the UK Government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) and the Automotive Council, Meridian has s

Start-up businesses with innovative solutions to transport challenges such as congestion, overcrowding, emissions and road safety are being encouraged to apply for a new accelerator programme. The Intelligent Mobility (IM) Accelerator programme focusses on IM areas such as connected and autonomous vehicles, connected infrastructure, customer experience, and transport data and analysis. The programme is a partnership between Transport Systems Catapult and Wayra UK, a start-up accelerator that i

The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) has launched a data facility that will enable access and analysis of various data sources to help address challenges in transport.  The Intelligent Mobility Data Hub (IMDH) is designed to provide a neutral, secure platform for transport organisations to allow access to and analyse their data. The hub currently stores data sets from government organisations, transport and technology businesses that offer insights into road travel and haulage patterns in

Traveller information must get much more reliable and available before Mobility as a Service (MaaS) can become a reality, a group of transport experts has warned. The ITS (UK) Public Transport Interest Group in London says out that only a quarter of bus companies have their timetable organised electronically, rather than on paper, making dynamic travel solutions almost impossible. The group said that more complete real-time information is required from local authorities and t

A Cambridge-based start-up is developing an autonomous driving system that could form the basis for self-driving taxi fleets and delivery vans. FiveAI is a partner in the UK’s StreetWise self-driving project and has raised £14m to develop self-driving vehicle technology. It has also received £12.8m in government funding for a second StreetWise project to develop a self-driving car pilot for London to cut traffic congestion and free up parking spaces. Other partners in the Str

The Scottish government has pledged to double funding for active travel projects from £40m to £80m a year from 2018-19. There are also plans in the Programme for Government, published today, to appoint an Active Nation Commissioner to deliver “world class active travel infrastructure across Scotland”. The programme, A Nation With Ambition, also states that the government will do more to promote the use of electric bikes “to ensure as many people as possible can ben

Domino’s Pizza has teamed up with Ford to run an autonomous car trial that delivers pizza to regular customers. The trial will monitor how people react to and interact with self-driving vehicles. Using the US version of the Mondeo, the Fusion hybrid autonomous cars are fitted with pizza containers designed to keep them warm whilst being delivered.  Once ordered, customers can check on the progress of the delivery using Domino’s app on their mobile phone. When the autonomous ve

A modified version of Uber's internal demand and usage data has been made available after getting feedback from city transport authorities that "access to our aggregated data will inform decisions to adapt infrastructure to make our cities more efficient". Uber emphasised that "Uber Movement" preserved the privacy of riders and drivers by anonymising the data, with full details outlined in a methodology white paper and said that data on origins and destinations was available under a Creati

Airbus is starting a new innovation centre in China for its new 'urban air mobility' concept, a pilotless, Uber-like service for air travel and 'last-mile' drone delivery that aims to challenge the automotive sector, it has been reported. Headed by Luo Gang, who established Uber China, as its CEO, Airbus China, and will set his sights on providing an alternative to both road freight and road travel in congested cities, noting the Voom on-demand helicopter service that has already been tested in

With roads close to saturation point and trains becoming overcrowded, transport providers and innovators must work together to develop new solutions, believes Stephen Hart at Innovate UK. “Congestion is getting worse, with growing frustration leading to more road rage,” he says. “There’s no longer a rush hour, there’s a rush five hours.” Current systems used to manage roads and rail services need to be better integrated to be effective, says Hart, head of co

The introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) on London’s streets must be done in a way that supports the mayor’s transport policies, Transport for London has said. Michael Hurwitz, TfL’s director of transport innovation, said CAVs presented both potential drawbacks and benefits.   On the drawbacks, he said: “Cheap, convenient car travel could be extended to Londoners who don’t have a car or a licence, therefore reducing public transport patron

New software designed to reduce congestion, encourage active travel, improve the passenger experience and help transport operators run more efficient services is being showcased by a programme to support startups. The programme was developed by Nitrous - a company that encourages collaboration between startups and the public sector to help create smart cities - and supported by Transport for London (TfL).   Several hundred applications were received and these were whittled down to a short

This blog’s title is not an oxymoron! As was explored in a workshop at the Modelling World Conference, academics are very industrious (or at least junior academics who are measured by what they deliver must be), the issues academics and industry face are very similar, and if academics and industry could collaborate more, we’d probably all be finding more and better solutions to many of society’s problems. And not just transport modelling ones. Ok, so I was at a transport model

The UK’s first Mobility as a Service (MaaS) pilot scheme is due to start in the West Midlands this autumn. A test group of 500 people will arrange their multi-modal journeys using a smartphone app. The project will be overseen by Transport for West Midlands (TfWM), an executive body of the West Midlands Combined Authority. “We are planning to recruit a control group alongside the initial 500 to test how MaaS works with other types of customer,” said TfWM’s managing direc

The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is exploring designating its Key Route Network (KRN) of roads as red routes, on which no stopping is permitted, except in designated bays.  The Liverpool City Region devolution agreement of November 2015 included a statement that a KRN of local roads would be managed by the combined authority on behalf of the Liverpool City Region mayor, with a single asset management plan.   The agreed network covers about 560km (10%) of the Liverpool Cit

Luis Willumsen’s contribution to transport modelling was recognised when he was presented with the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award in the Masters of Modelling Awards at Modelling World. Willumsen has had a 35-year career in transport modelling, including 20 years at Steer Davies Gleave (1989-2009), and is co-author of the book Modelling Transport, now in its fourth edition. The award was sponsored by PTV Group. Chris Wroe from Movement Strategies was presented with the New Master of M

The challenge that disruptive technologies such as autonomous vehicles and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) pose for transport modelling loomed large at this year’s Modelling World event.  Delivering the opening paper, Luis Willumsen, director of Willumsen Advisory Services and Kineo Mobility Analytics, said modellers were faced with huge new uncertainties, making the job of forecasting ever more difficult.  Factors included: political instability; behaviour change; autonomous vehi

This year's Modelling World, held last week in London – the largest gathering of transport modellers to have taken place in the UK, with a record attendance of 261 – was topped off with the presentation of the first Masters of Modelling Awards during the very well-attended networking session that closed the one-day event. Modeller Luis Willumsen (Director, Willumsen Advisory Services & Kineo Mobility Analytics) was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, kindly sponsored b

A ‘TravelBot’ that ‘chats’ to customers and offers real-time travel information has been launched by Transport for London (TfL).  The tool, which is powered by artificial intelligence, communicates with customers using Messenger (Facebook's instant messaging service) and tells them when their bus is due to arrive, and provides service updates and Tube maps. The new technology makes it easier for customers to get information on the Messenger platform in a way that i

The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) has announced that Paul Campion has been appointed as chief executive officer.  Campion joins the TSC from his position leading IBM’s Global Financing in the UK and Ireland. IBM Global Financing is an IT financing house that helps IBM’s clients and partners optimise the financial cases for their IT transformations. He has previously worked in a variety of technical, marketing and sales operational leadership roles for IBM, both in the UK an

Saudi Arabia’s traffic safety issues have recently reached alarming levels when compared to the rest of the world. While considerable resources are being spent by the public sector to reverse the emerging traffic safety crisis nationwide in terms of expansion of infrastructure, much research is still needed to consider the different avenues of deployment of ITS to help deter the steeply inclining traffic safety issues curve. The Saudi Aramco Chair for Traffic Safety research, with the help

It’s easy to stereotype different generations; changing values and different levels of comfort with technology often create the sense that there is a growing gulf between old and young. Much has been made of the age-related factors in the Brexit vote, for example. But is your generation really that different from that of your parents (other than in spending an inordinate amount of time on social media)? Is there value in understanding generational factors? And what applications might this

Since Kazakhstan shrugged off the Soviets in 1991 and declared its independence, Almaty, the country’s largest city, has gone through an unprecedented period of growth. That growth was powered by the entrepreneurial energy unleashed through liberation which swept through much of the nation’s economic and social life, not least when it came to public transport. The trouble is that the buccaneering spirit is not necessarily as liberating for local commuters as it can be for the bus op

In December 2015, the 196 countries attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris came to an historic agreement that could have the most profound repercussions for the future.  The Paris agreement aims to reduce worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases down to zero by the second half of this century, limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. It is a boldly ambitious proposal, but some of the tools that could make that ambition a reality, in

How often do we see car parks being built, and not meeting the end users’ needs? Time and again we reach our destination, be it a mall on a Friday or an office during the week, and we are faced with the dreaded experience of circling around a car park looking for a space, or being stuck in a queue waiting to even enter the car park.  Whilst sometimes this may be down to a shortage of parking spaces, often these issues arise due to poor car park design and signage. So what is wrong wi

Streetlytics allows users to make well-informed decisions by providing direct access to detailed, ready-to-use insights on a particular population, its activity, and movements across all modes of travel from the current day into the future. As traffic analysts, we need to know the reasons why travel is happening, as well as key facts about the trips and flows on our streets and transport services. The questions asked in traffic operations and in modelling are who, when, where, why and how. WHO:

Transportation forecasting models were first implemented in the 1950s, back in the days of punch-cards and mainframe computers. Yet advances in modelling techniques, computing power and data availability have not been accompanied by a systematic uptick in predictive performance. Fact. So a more fruitful line of enquiry might switch attention from production to consumption. How can investors become smarter consumers of traffic forecasts? A good place to start is by improving our understanding of

The first part of the question implies that we are in a world of rapid change. The rise of Uber, increasing autonomy of vehicles, electrification, on-line shopping… the list goes on. Change is happening for sure – but how rapid it is and how much of it is defined by changes to transport technologies seems much more open to question. I argue here that there are a number of trends, many of which our traditional approaches to understanding demand did not anticipate, that have been on-g

Welcome… This year's Data and Modelling publication brings together thoughts from three events in the Modelling World series: Modelling Tomorrow's World, run in November 2016 in partnership with the Transport Systems Catapult, Modelling World Middle East 2017, held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in February 2017, and themes and ideas to be discussed at this year's Modelling World in London, to be held on June 14 for the 12th successful year.  It is published at a time of unprecede

An ability to interact with customers through apps is going to have a huge impact on our industry, and will change the way that local transport is provided over the next decade,” says Peter Bell, technology and innovation director for transport software provider Trapeze. “It’s a fairly obvious point, but nevertheless crucial, that traditional operators underestimate the speed at which things will flip. The generation of those who can’t or won’t use a smartphone is r

I was excited when accessibility planning was introduced as part of the local transport plan process in England. But I wasn’t surprised when little appeared to change. A major reason for this is the sheer complexity of accessibility measurement. Nonetheless, the underlying project – doing something to reduce transport inequality – remains valid. I set out here a new and more straightforward way of approaching the issue. Accessibility measures, though well-intentioned, are cumb

The government has today awarded £4m in funding to projects designed to cut congestion, speed up journey times and help clean up the environment. Apps that notify motorists of congestion and free parking spaces, as well as real-time journey information for visually impaired passengers, are among the projects that have received a share of the funding. Nineteen councils across England will get between £50,000 and £300,000 for their ideas to improve journeys through digital inno

New solar-powered ‘e-paper’ display screens that provide real-time details of bus services are being launched in the UK by FWT, the transport information design specialist. The units, designed by Papercast, provide passengers with real-time bus arrival predictions, timetables and other relevant passenger information at bus stops. The displays are controlled by a cloud-based management system that offer instant GTFS integration to improve the accuracy of bus arrival predictions, says

Community transport and car clubs have common ancestry in the UK but have diverged significantly over the years. The emergence of new technology and more widespread disruption in the transport sector now opens all sorts of opportunities to look again at what the future might hold across and beyond these sectors. A recent Community Transport Association (CTA) conference exposed a fundamental conundrum for transport professionals. Those operating community transport on the very smallest scale see

A new traffic management tool is being developed by Transport for London (TfL) to ease congestion and improve air quality.  The Real Time Origin Destination Tool (RODAT) is designed to identify incidents on the road network quickly and take necessary action to avert gridlock, said Glynn Barton, TfL’s head of outcomes delivery, road space management. “RODAT provides a detailed understanding of the traffic flows entering central London, which is used in real time to identify the

In thinking about tomorrow’s world, it is important to separate out the modelling required in operating such a future, recognising quite different levels of automation and connectivity, data and information flows, pricing and control mechanisms; as opposed to the modelling required to forecast what such futures may look like, and supporting decision-making today.  In that context it may be useful to separate out four quadrants in the modelling vs time range. Modelling Today's World

Says Tom van Vuren: It was of course inevitable – that our Modelling World family would at some point also include Tomorrow’s World. And although we tend to peek into the future in our traditional Modelling World events, this new conference in the series is an opportunity to bring in new perspectives from organisations and players not immediately involved in delivery of modelling, data and visualisation in today’s world. 

It's not difficult to agree with the statement that existing modelling is inadequate, says Miles Logie, director at Minnerva, but he is concerned about' throwing away' too many  relevant items from existing modelling practice. 'I think the challenge is to find a way which hangs on to the significant elements of what’s been achieved, but is also open to new approaches that deal with the new circumstances that need to be modelled,' he says. 'Finding the right path forwards is a key iss

Transport is being disrupted at a rapid pace, and this creates uncertainty but also new business opportunities. Over the past few years the Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) has met many decision-makers who want to know what transport market disruption means for investing in infrastructure, place-making, vehicle manufacturing and city operations. We have also met with many academics, SMEs and entrepreneurs who have excellent ideas for innovations to take forward the opportunities that are opening

With a population of nearly 2.5 million people in its greater metropolitan area, Vienna is the largest city in Austria. The city is actively taking forward measures to improve sustainable transport, including stringent parking space management and improving conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. These policies are outlined in STEP 2025, Vienna City Council's Urban Development Plan, of which Andreas Trisko, Head of Department of Urban Development and Planning, City of Vienna, was a key contribu

The UK faces a potential skills shortage of 742,000 people in the intelligent sector by 2025, warns a new report from Transport System Catapult (TSC).  Intelligent mobility (IM) is a “fast-growing and lucrative market” which will have a global market value of £900bn a year by 2025, states the report. The UK is in a strong position to win a “significant share of this market”, with a five-year £200m Intelligent Mobility Programme now in place, funded joint

Transport is experiencing a period of disruption. New thinking, new business models, new technologies and new channels for sharing and engagement are combining to offer real potential for positive change. Join us on 24 November to meet expert international speakers and hear them explain how towns and cities can make the most of these new opportunites. Become part of the Better Places Network to remain involved with news, developments and best practice. Why?

For Mobility as a Service to succeed in cities, it should not just aim to meet the needs of travellers and service providers, but also contribute to the livability of places. James Gleave, Foresight Analyst, Transport Systems Catapult The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) has defined Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as 'using a digital interface to source and manage the provision of a transport related service(s) which meets the mobility requirements of a customer'. There are two core strengths

Imagine taking the children to school, commute to work or drive across town to do some shopping without ever hitting a single red traffic light. Ford is trialling technology that tells you the best speed to reach traffic lights on green, something it hopes will make “riding the green wave” a day-to-day reality. Green Light Optimal Speed Advisory uses information on traffic light timings from a roadside unit to display to the driver the best speed to travel at to get a green light. T

The models we use today, says Neffendorf, in conversation with Modelling World programme director Juliana O'Rourke, tend to be based on how people behave today, or are projections from trends, or from cross-sectional analysis of people's current behaviour. But the disruptions that the transport sector is facing, and the dramatic changes in society, technology and information, mean that these no longer hold true. 'We must think about what is changing, and how we get to where we need to be. Devel

'Times are changing,' says Hugh Neffendorf, founder, Katalysis Limited, and one of the coordinators for the Transport Systems Catapult-organised Modelling Tomorrow's World. Our models need to change too, he says. 'We need to ask whether many of the models we use today are fit for purpose in terms of modelling for a very different future...'  The models we use today, says Neffendorf, in conversation with Modelling World programme director Juliana O'Rourke, tend to be based on how people beh

A rival to the London cycle hire scheme, which will be free to use, is due to launch next week. The Buzzbike scheme is seeking to challenge the Santander scheme. Each single-speed bicycle has an advert displayed on the frame and rear mudguards, emulating the way black cab drivers display company promotions. In return for a free hire of a bike and lock, as well as free insurance, riders must sign a contract agreeing to ride to work at least 12 days a month, and park their bike in a public place

A new version of the London underground map that shows how many footsteps it takes to walk between stations in Zones 1 and 2, has been introduced by Transport for London (TfL). The new map is the first official version in the world to show the number of steps between stations. It follows TfL's Walking Tube map, launched last year, which shows the walking times between stations.  London Mayor Sadiq Khan says the map will be a fun and practical way to help busy Londoners who want to make wa

TRL, the UK’s surface transport research laboratory, has joined an international research partnership exploring connected and autonomous transport. TRL has formed a strategic alliance with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA. TRL will join organisations such as Apple, Google, BP, Intel, BT and BAE Systems as a member of the CSAIL Alliance Program, who work with MIT to enhance knowledge in the ar

The UK Smart Mobility Lab in Greenwich has been presented with an award by Intelligent Systems (UK). The lab has been set up by TRL to provide a real world test bed for testing connected and automated vehicle technologies. It has been created with the support of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, CCAV, Innovate UK and DfT. Key partners include RSA, Direct Line, Telefonica, Shell, Sony, Jaguar Land Rover and Oxbotica. ITS (UK) is a not-for-profit public/private sector association that provides a

NEARLY TWO months after the fact, it has become known that in May what appears to be the first fatality in a highly-automated car occurred. A Tesla Model S operating in ‘Autopilot’ mode struck the trailer of an articulated lorry, killing the driver of the Model S. Neither the Autopilot system nor the driver (who was meant to be attentive to road conditions at all times, as per Autopilot’s user agreement) recognised the hazard. This incident – and Tesla’s management

A multi-modal app-driven approach to transport in San Francisco has led to a big fall in car usage in the US city, according to Timothy Papandreou, chief innovation officer and director at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Speaking at the Imagine Festival in Milton Keynes last week, Papandreou said that SFMTA had set itself the target of reducing car use from 60% to 50% of miles travelled by 2018. But thanks to a range of ‘connectivity’ measures it achieved the

A multi-modal app-driven approach to transport in San Francisco has led to a dramatic fall in car usage in the US city, according to Timothy Papandreou, chief innovation officer and director at San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Speaking at the Imagine Festival in Milton Keynes on Tuesday, Papandreou said that SFMTA had set itself the target of reducing car use from 60% to 50% of miles travelled by 2018. But thanks to a range of ‘connectivity’ measures it achieve

The outcome of the UK’s referendum on European Union membership on 23 June could have big implications for a wide range of transport policies and operations, even though transport has received little coverage in the debate that has dominated the media for weeks.   Andrew Petry, a partner in law firm Simmons-Simmons, who is an expert on EU infrastructure and its procurement, summarises how the referendum debate has tended to generate more heat than light. “Nobody has the answers

Shane Luck, a former MSc student at Newcastle University now employed by WSP Group, has been awarded the joint TRL/ITS (UK) Student Prize for best essay. His essay was titled “How can future applications of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) in surface transport improve the transport system for the user?” The competition was judged by a panel comprising Dr Alan Stevens of TRL, Professor Peter White of the University of Westminster, and Jennie Martin of ITS (UK). Receiving his pri

Earlier this week roads minister Andrew Jones gave us a peek at what the Modern Transport Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech, will have to say about motor insurance, promising consultation over the summer. This seems to represent the driverless car taking one more step away from the realms of science fiction, one more step towards our everyday travel reality. It’s easy to see why the Government is so keen to put the UK at the forefront of developing autonomous technology –

Transport will "be like Netflix and Spotify," with nobody owning a car, but instead subscribing for a "mobility service," according to MaaS, the Finnish firm behind a smartphone app bringing together public transport and car-hire and taxi-hailing. Sampo Hietanen, MaaS chief executive, made the claim as the firm continues its drive for investment for a commercial launch next year. He gave more details to journalists of the service, which will allow users to specify how many train j

A 'Modern Transport Bill' to encourage investment in driverless cars, drones and space-planes is part of today's Queen's Speech, with the aim of reducing congestion and making journeys safer. The Government declares that "modern transportation can make more efficient use of roads, railways and airspace, speeding up journeys for people and goods," as it lays out its plans to "cut red-tape" and ensure appropriate insurance is available for autonomous vehicles. The legislation will aim to build on

Members of the public can now register to participate in the UK’s first public driverless vehicle trials, due to take place later this year. The trials, which will take place in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, are part of the GATEway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) project, an £8m research project to investigate the use, perception and acceptance of autonomous vehicles in the UK. The trials are being run at the UK Smart Mobility Lab. They will see fully electr

To be a successful transport planning freelancer requires a wide and distinctive range of skills, including a high degree of flexibility, impartiality, diplomacy, self-confidence, and good communication abilities.  Every freelancer has a unique story to tell, but it is not a form of employment that will suit everyone. Peter Mattinson, a director of recruitment consultants the Mattinson Partnership, has wide experience in placing freelance transport contractors, and emphasises that some peo

The majority of British motorists want to retain the right to drive even though driverless cars are coming, according to two pieces of ne research by IAM RoadSmart. The motoring skills charity conducted an independent survey of 1,000 British motorists as well as a separate poll among its 92,000 members. Some 65% of motorists believe that a human being should always be in control of the vehicle, and 53% saying that the focus should be on making drivers safer, not just cars. “Technologica

There are many new sensors that can be used to collect travel data or produce digital traces that in turn can be processed to deliver this type of information. CCTV, smart cards, bank cards, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), mobile phones, Bluetooth devices and WiFi all leave digital footprints that offer the opportunity of collecting travel data at low cost. Conventional methods such as Household Travel (HTS) and Intercept Surveys are not error-free, and the observations are often disappointed

What are the current challenges with respect to sustainable cities and transport planning in Middle East context?  Nadeem Shakir: Car culture is dominant across the Middle East, with as many as 700 cars per 1,000 population, one of the highest rates in the world, and growing at 6.5 per cent per annum in the GCC region. With summer tempertures of +50 degrees celsius, it's no surprise that encouraging moves to public transport is a real challenge. The maximum walkable distance used in the pl

Intelligent Data has observed the change in the use of mobile phone data over the past few years with interest, wondering how this is going to 'change the industry forever', yet no one seems to be sticking their heads (and/or shoulders) above the parapet and suggesting the best way to harness these vast data sets.  Yes, there are early adopters using mobile phone data but, as with any new technology, there appear – from our understanding and conversations within the market – to

A mile? Five miles? A bit more or less? If you are a typical adult who doesn’t count every step or heartbeat with a hi-tech wearable fitness monitor, it’s a safe bet that your answer will be some version of ‘I haven’t a clue’. After all, for most of us walking is something we do in between other activities, almost unconsciously, barely giving it a thought. We walk to the car, bus, Tube or train, but the real business of getting from place to place, the stuff we con

The UK government announced FLOURISH in February this year as one of eight projects that will help to advance the successful implementation of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The three-year, £5.5-million project will address three key objectives: Achieve a better understanding of consumer demands and expectations, particularly the implications of an ageing society; Address vulnerabilities in CAV technology, particularly cyber security and wireless communications; E

If you had asked me five years ago what the main role of a transport modeller is, I would have said: 'to develop and use good transport models, but not to determine the required inputs about the future'. In my view that would have been the job of another expert, an economist perhaps, or a demographer. I would have said that good transport models would obviously show a good fit to observed data, and that we as modellers should be able to show that, when forecasting, the output elasticities were r

We are entering an era of software dependency, which is why the Googles and Apples of the world are so interested in the transport sector. This issue of Data and Modelling reflects these ongoing changes in focus; from modelling Connected and Autonomous Vehicles, better understanding how to model walking and public transport, how to use big data effectively, and how integrating land use and door-to-door transport plans is bringing new challenges for modellers. This issue also addresses a key ques

This year the government will lay out a process to be followed by councils in planning walking and cycling routes through the Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans. To help councils decide where to build these new routes we have developed the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT).  The model, funded by the DfT, helps planners to identify areas of greatest unmet demand for non-motorised modes. It uses origin-destination data, initially commuting data from Census 2011, and allocates trips to the

An initiative to develop a system where travellers could book one journey using many different modes of transport is getting underway in Manchester. The TravelSpirit consortium's website has launched after enthusiasm from the DfT, which is a board member of the consortium, and "progressive city region authorities" in Alto Adige and Helsinki - which pledged to make personal car travel obsolete by combining private and public data from all providers of m

It is easy to underestimate the complexity of the current National Transport Model (NTM) and the pressure on the DfT team that manages and operates it.   Model development and model operation vie for sparse resources – I know that only too well myself as guardian of the PRISM model in the West Midlands.  I am sure that the questions that senior civil servants and ministers ask of the modellers in the Department are tough, highly political and require answering within very tight

The transition to autonomous vehicles in urban areas will mean fewer parking spaces are needed, freeing up “huge tracts of land” for other uses, according to Rachel Skinner, a director at consultant WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff. Speaking at the London Infrastructure Summit last week, she told delegates: “If we reach the point where autonomous vehicles are available for shared use in a particular location, there will be no direct parking demand at the trip origin or destination.

A utopian vision for the future of private transport in the UK reached an audience of many millions when a BBC correspondent gave the idea significant nationwide coverage.  “There are currently 31 million cars in Britain, but are we close to ‘peak car’?” The BBC’s home affairs editor, Mark Easton, asked on 9 March. “Could technology – including driverless electric vehicles and uber-style apps – mean that, rather than owning a car, we will soo

The winners of the Smarter Travel Awards have been revealed at ArenaMk in Milton Keynes this evening. The awards were presented at the end of day one of Smarter Travel LIVE! The awards ceremony was presented by Richard Armitage, chair of the independent judging panel made up of prominent transport professionals. The winners: * Best Shared Mobility Service Provider Award: Co-Wheels Club  * Best Smarter Travel Marketing Campaign Award: Diva Creative &ndash

Many local car journeys are the ”opposite” of smart travel and steps must be taken to encourage driver behaviour change, said transport minister Andrew Jones at Smarter Travel LIVE! today. Speaking at the start of the two-day event, hosted by Milton Keynes Council and organised by Landor LINKS, Jones said that the best way to encourage behaviour change was to develop “attractive and affordable options” such as car sharing and car clubs. He told delegates: &ldq

The increasing use of driverless technologies will make roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians, believes Rachel Skinner, a director at consultant WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff. Speaking at the London Infrastructure Summit last week, she told delegates that more than 90% of road accidents are due to driver error, citing the DfT’s Reported Road Casualties in Great Britain: Main Results 2014. Of these accidents, in urban areas, 50% are caused by drivers failing to look properly while 40% are

Concerns that the use of jargon is preventing the benefits of technology in transport being communicated to decision-makers has prompted ITS (UK) to draft what it hopes are plain English definitions. ITS (UK), the association for the UK Intelligent Transport Systems sector, has published pitches making the case for using ITS that it hopes are plainly worded and avoids technical jargon and unexplained acronyms. The pitches are aimed at stakeholders with general transport knowledge and at politic

With global warming and public health becoming issues of growing concern, we are seeing a shift from car-dominated transport to active travel. Increasing fuel prices and obesity levels are adding to the pressure to make this change sooner rather than later. In particular, schools need to encourage pupils to make active travel choices and rely less upon cars and public transport. “With improvements in software and data, head teachers can quickly work out safe walking routes and distances t

Maas is an exciting development in the transport sector, offering a new way of thinking in terms of how the delivery and consumption of transport is managed.  It is an efficient, personalised transport service, integrating a range of modes and presenting the consumer with the best options for getting from A to B through the use of an app. Flexible ticketing and payment options allow consumers to pay for access to a range of mobility options, rather than a specific mode.  Over the yea

Six passenger transport personalities will be making quick-fire pitches at Smarter Travel LIVE! in a bid to win the ‘Totally Smarter Transport Fund’, reports Meera Rambissoon Picture the scene: Six livewire transport personalities, hungry for funding, with an appetite for smart ideas and willing to do anything to get their hands on the lion’s share of the ‘Totally Smarter Transport Fund (TSTF)’ – in the wilds of… Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes, wild? (C

Global trends are disrupting traditional ways of providing services to people and businesses in urban areas. Smart mobile in combination with the Cloud will provide mobility packages to meet an individual’s needs and values. This emerging market is attracting non-traditional players who have the skills and expertise to provide such services.  These changes will bring huge benefits to users and cities, but also disruption and threats to existing business models and governance. Whoever

Global trends are disrupting traditional ways of providing services to people and businesses in urban areas. Smart mobile in combination with the Cloud will provide packages of mobility services profiled to an individual’s needs and values. This emerging market is attracting new, non-traditional players who have the skills and expertise to provide such services. These changes will bring huge benefits to users and cities, but also disruption and threats to existing business models and gover

A project to make multi-modal transport information freely available to transport authorities and application developers is set to encourage modal-shift and to ease congestion, according to those behind the initiative. The 'one TRANSPORT' project, launched last year, aims to encourage more effective transport apps by stimulating the market through amalgamating datasets - and potentially also create new revenue streams. It involves a partnership between Arup, Clearview Traffic Group, Imperi

Maas is an exciting development in the transport sector, offering a new way of thinking in terms of how the delivery and consumption of transport is managed.  It is an efficient, personalised transport service, integrating a range of modes and presenting the consumer with the best options for getting from A to B through the use of an app. Flexible ticketing and payment options allow consumers to pay for access to a range of mobility options, rather than a specific mode.  Over the yea

On-street testing of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is to be carried out in the coming months in Greenwich by transport consultancy TRL. The new UK Smart Mobility Living Lab represents the first “open innovation environment for CAVs”, according to TRL. This, it says, will allow for services and processes to be “safely developed, evaluated and integrated within the local community”. The UK Smart Mobility Living Lab will be used by vehicle manufacturers, tech deve

Road safety, traffic management, cycle parking and data visualisation systems are among the many systems in contention for the Intertraffic Innovation Awards. The competition is open to innovative systems that will be on show at the exhibition, which takes place at RAI Amsterdam between 5-8 April. An international jury has scrutinised 91 candidates and shortlisted 15 finalists. Awards will be presented in five categories – Infrastructure, Traffic Management, Safety, Parking, and Smar

Like other areas of the transport and engineering professional sectors, the ITS (intelligent transport systems) workforce is made up of competent, well qualified and committed individuals. Also, like much of UK transport and engineering, the professional workforce is overwhelmingly male and white. The ITS World Congress in 2009 was held in Stockholm, Sweden, a country where the above does not apply to the same extent. This was a catalyst for a number of female ITS professionals from around Euro

If you are under the impression that the digitisation of passenger transport planning, information and payment is still a far-off train heading for your station, you need to check the real-time departure board app on your phone. When you do, you will find that it's already sped past you, and catching up with it will be no mean feat. Over the past 18 months FWT has been developing the CartoGold suite of online interactive travel planning solutions. By using scheduled and real-time passenger tran

Perched on the Sunrise Coast of Suffolk, Lowestoft holds the title of the ‘most easterly settlement in the UK’. Unlike many coastal resorts it retains that quintessential feel of a traditional seaside town, with colourful beach huts lining a picturesque sandy beach.  Yet, from a transport perspective, the town is not without its challenges. It is divided in two by Lake Lothing, which means there is an almost constant flow of two-way traffic between the north and south of the to

Give me a snapshot of your Smarter Travel career to date? Rachel Evans: I’ve been at Atkins for three years and have been involved with a wide range of travel behavioural change projects. My experiences include leading multi-business travel forums at business parks to managing community Personalised Travel Planning (PTP) and the implementation of Travel Demand Management for Gloucester’s host City role in the 2015 Rugby World Cup.  Sarah Fisher: My decade at Atkins has  b

One of the outcomes of the Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) is that a substantial body of evidence now exists highlighting the factors that contribute to a successful travel behaviour change programme. What emerged is the importance of targeting interventions where they are most likely to have an impact. But how can this targeting be achieved, and what impact does successful targeting have? Good targeting pays off One of the very clear and consistent messages from the recent round of LS

Our major urban areas are experiencing a period of accelerating technological and social change. Demographics, the capabilities of smart devices, the expectations of citizens and even the climate are all changing.  The pace of this change can be bewildering. From social media to Uber, ideas move rapidly from the margins to the mainstream. What not so long ago was seen as science fiction has become science fact, either in the here and now or just over the horizon. We now live in a world whe

Anyone who has ever experienced the morning rush hour knows just how busy the UK’s roads are. Unfortunately it’s only set to get busier. The Office of National Statistics estimates that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2027 and this rise, combined with a growing UK economy and falling levels of unemployment, will lead to more people commuting into cities by road for work.  We are already seeing it starting to happen. INRIX’s Urban Mobility Scorecard report, publ

Population growth, traffic, pollution and the overall transport experience are such that a change in direction is needed. Much of the transport network is over-stretched and traditional solutions, such as road widening schemes or extra services, often lag behind the requirements they are trying to meet and tend to be prohibitively expensive. The Transport Systems Catapult highlighted the challenges in its Traveller Needs and UK Capability study. Commissioned by the Department for Transport and

Funding is always a concern in the world of sustainable transport. What was laudable about the £600m Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF), launched in 2011, was that it gave considerable and consistent funding support to schemes that focused on cycling, walking and behaviour change as opposed to road building.  This time last year a major cause for concern among Smarter Travel practitioners was whether there would be funding to secure the legacy of LSTF and provide a platform for

Welcome to Smarter Travel 2016.  As the following pages illustrate, this is an exciting time in Smarter Travel, with technology offering innovations that look set to change the face of mobility. Shared transport is growing in popularity as an alternative to car ownership. We bring the latest on car, bike and taxi share as well as workplace shared ride schemes. Passenger transport is also adapting to change through Open Data projects.  Meanwhile, the car itself is changing - fully au

The Bus Planning Model (BPM) from the Department of Transport (DoT), Emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is part of its integrated bus planning and operating systems. It uses actual bus operations data captured by Automated Vehicle Monitoring (AVM) and Automated Fare Collection (AFC) Systems to facilitate bus planners in the evaluation and optimisation of bus networks and bus operational planning. By Oscar Jiang Jing The DoT has developed its bus planning model to provide reliable and e

A Smart City design process is one that employs urban technologies to create effective outcomes for people. Much attention has been paid to technologies that collect, visualise and analyse data. Less discussion has taken place about the use of data to design cities and buildings using predictive models. The Space Syntax approach combines data sensing, mapping and analysis with creative design. Experience suggests that data-driven design processes will become more popular in the planning of futur

In the Middle East, large scale, car-orientated, suburban developments are being built, sometimes on private estates, sometimes on public land. Driver experience, however, is usually not considered during the design process, leading to potential complaints from new residents. Can drivers’ communting experience be taken into account at concept design stage? By David Carrignon and Vijit Vijayan In the Middle East, when new suburban areas are developed on public land, the road infrastructure

Model accuracy depends on the coverage and the eligibility of input data and reasonably accurate model validation. In countries undergoing rapid and continuous change, there is an urgent need to develop an approach for continuous and targeted data collection programmes using smart technology. By Reza Mohammadi Over the last two decades, cities in the Middle East have witnessed significant growth in economic development, resulting in population growth and higher levels of employment which,

Two months ago, in December of last year, the 196 countries attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris came to an historic agreement that could have the most profound repercussions for the future of the world. By Matt Pollard and Duncan Irons The so-called Paris Agreement, if ratified by the required 55 governments, will bring net worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases down to zero by the second half of this century, limiting the global temperatu

Dubai currently has a population of just above 2 million, but it is set to grow massively by 2030 based on the developers’ forecast. If all the potential new developments are released, the residential supply could top 10-12 million in 15-20 years’ time. Aurecon is the lead consultant for the development of Dubai’s future transport strategy, and is behind several of the region’s major transport masterplans. Nadeem Shakir talks to Data and Modelling ME When working with ma

A few months ago I was involved in a project in Australia, advising a regional public sector client on how to improve the way in which they used transport modelling in their day-to-day business. As part of this work I reviewed 'best practice' guidance from around the world. This proved to be a highly educational exercise, says Tom Van Vuren My first concern was that the type and style of advice available around the world is so different – how could I amalgamate such varied approaches to g

Smart City Modelling: Modelling World Middle East 2016 will provide a unique platform for regional professionals to explore and debate the opportunities offered, and challenges faced, by a region with highly ambitious plans for development and growth. World-class events such as Expo 2020 Dubai and the Qatar World Cup 2022 will demand global best practice in connected urban mobility and logistics.  The rapidly-growing smart cities of the region have ambitious plans to make good use of emerg

London's mayoral candidates have been urged to go beyond appointing a chief data officer and ensure that private data is exploited to cut congestion and improve parking. The candidates all backed the idea of a chief data officer to better analyse collected data in a hustings, according to reports, but they suggested that only one, Green Party candidate Sian Berry, vowed to face down privacy concerns and capture data

The Australian regional government of New South Wales today called on "the world's brightest tech minds" to produce new ideas to "transform transport for the better". The NSW Government will host 'Future Transport,' a 12-month programme to uncover trends and technologies that aims to revolutionise the way that government and passengers plan, build and use transport. 'Future Transport' will start with a two-day summit in April, to bring together "IT specialists, innovators, enterpreneurs, futuri

Real-time data from connected cars can help transport authorities to swiftly make informed decisions to alleviate congestion, believes Graham Bradley, senior director & UK country manager at traffic data experts Inrix. “The Office of National Statistics estimates that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2027 and this rise, combined with a growing UK economy and falling levels of unemployment, will only lead to more people taking to the roads, commuting into cities for work,&rdq

Highways England appears to have been caught by surprise at traffic growth of 10-13% in just one year on the first two sections of M25 smart motorway, where the hard shoulder has been converted to a permanent extra traffic lane.  The UK’s first smart motorway all lane running (SM-ALR) schemes were introduced on  London’s orbital motorway in spring 2014 between junctions 23 (A1(M)) and 27 (M11) on the north side; and junctions 5 and 7 on the south side, straddling Surrey an

There is a gentle battle brewing which will be an undercurrent at next month’s ‘Smarter Travel’ conference in Milton Keyes. I call it a gentle battle because it is partly a competition for the meaning of words, a dispute that is rarely resolved except by usage, can take quite a long time, and may not affect the underlying reality of things. But it can be a source of great confusion unless one understands what is going on, which is the purpose of this column.  In recent ye

The European Commission has award the contract for the supply of modelling software to develop its multi-modal transport model covering all freight and passenger transport movements to PTV. The task is to develop TRIMODE as a "robust, fully operational and integrated modelling system," covering all the economic structures generating transport demand across the EU, and its environmental and energy impacts. PTV will supply its modelling software PTV Visum and associated professional services.&nbs

A consortium of companies has been launched with the aim of positioning the UK as a world leader in automated and self-driving cars. The MOVE_UK project, which has received a £5.5m grant from InnovateUK, will see driverless technology trialled in real world conditions on roads in Greenwich, south London.  The three-year MOVE_UK project will provide data that will be used to develop and improve the technology and safety of automated driving systems.  Sajid

The European Commission has declared that connected cars should be on the road by 2019 as industry representatives and public authorities agreed a shared vision for deploying co-operative intelligent transport systems. Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications have a "strong potential to improve road safety and road transport efficiency," the report states, but says without common action, deciding where to start investing, and how to make systems inter-operable, would be p

Funding of £40m has been awarded to cities and towns across the UK to promote electric cars, the Department for Transport (DfT) announced today.  London will get £13m to create ‘Neighbourhoods of the Future’ prioritising ultra-low emission vehicles (ULEVs) in several boroughs. Elsewhere, Milton Keynes has won £9m to open a city centre Electric Vehicle Experience Centre, Bristol will get £7m to offer free residential parking for ULEVs while Nottinghamshir

There is growing evidence of a shift in lifestyle choices from ownership to use, according to Alistair Kirkbride, director at Carplus, the environmental transport NGO. “Whether it’s AirBnB or Uber, the headlines are being grabbed by apps rather than infrastructure. And travel is at the centre of this revolution,” says Kirkbride, who will be speaking at Smarter Travel LIVE! “Young professionals in cities increasingly invest in smartphones to hail a ride rather than in the

Intelligent transport systems have a vital role to play in tackling  transport challenges ranging from cycling safety to motorway management, says Jennie Martin, secretary general of ITS (UK).   At Smarter Travel LIVE! she will explain how electronics, information and communications technologies can deliver transport improvements more efficiently than extensions to physical infrastructure.  “This will save money, typically 50%, and reduce environmental impact,” she a

Smarter Travel LIVE! is ideally timed to explore the connections emerging between sustainable travel and intelligent mobility solutions. Both have an important role to play in developing sustainable alternatives to the current transport model. The Landor LINKS event, which takes place at ArenaMK in Milton Keynes on 17-18 March, will serve as the first opportunity to learn more about the government’s new £580m ‘Access’ fund for sustainable transport. This marks a continua

Elected mayors should set up data teams to collect, collate and put to use public and private data to make cycling safer and improve public transport, a new report argues. The think-tank Policy Exchange says most U.K cities have "failed to put in place even the most basic mechanisms to join-up, analyse and act upon the vast quantity of data they already have". Cities agreeing to elected mayors need a Mayor's Office of Data Analytics, like in New York, to combine and analyse data from different

Uber has announced a partnership with a U.S public transportation app TransLoc Rider to bring together "the best of private transportation and public transit for truly integrated mobility". Users will be able to incorporate multiple modes, including public transit, into their commutes, which Uber claims will help transport operators overcome "the first-mile/last-mile challenge," encouraging more people to use public transport because they have a way of getting to or from their final destination

Are you interested in contributing to make driverless vehicles secure, smarter, and efficient? Then the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Challenge might be your chance. The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) and the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT) are seeking innovative ideas from postgraduates, professionals, and academics, which could accelerate the introduction of autonomous vehicles onto public roads in a competition that’s running on IMExchange. The IMExcha

The rapid growth of Personal Navigation Devices such as satnavs is helping drivers take alternative routes to avoid congestion. Yet heavy diversionary traffic can disrupt local travel. Rhodri Clark reports on whether and how the impacts of displaced traffic can be alleviated. Pete Waterman isn’t a happy man whenever there’s motorway disruption near his home. The former music producer, now a member of the Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership, recently told a rail summ

Intelligent transport systems have a vital role to play in tackling a host of transport challenges ranging from cycling safety to motorway management, believes Jennie Martin, secretary general of ITS (UK).   At Smarter Travel LIVE she will explain how electronics, information and communications technologies can deliver transport improvements more efficiently than extensions to physical infrastructure. “This will save money, typically 50%, and reduce environmental impact,&rd

By using real-time data from connected cars, transport authorities can swiftly make informed decisions to alleviate congestion, writes Graham Bradley  Anyone who has ever experienced a morning rush hour knows just how busy the UK’s roads are. But unfortunately, it’s only set to get busier. The Office of National Statistics estimates that the UK population will reach 70 million by 2027 and this rise, combined with a growing UK economy and falling levels of unemployment, will onl

Chancellor George Osborne announced a £580m new ‘Access’ fund for sustainable transport in Wednesday’s Spending Review. The funding is made up of £80m revenue and £500m capital to be awarded over the next five years. This represents a continuation of the Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF), a programme launched by the Coalition Government in 2010 offering £560m to projects that promote changes to travel behaviour. The DfT says that next month it wil

1. It’s never too early in a public transport project to define its associated information strategy Whilst most transport professionals understand the need to provide good quality information to assist travellers en route, it is often neglected in the early stages of a project – being seen as something that can be tackled as the project nears completion. However, experience shows that by then most of the design and investment decisions have been made. Providing information at the ke

It was a case of clash of the academic titans at last month’s Intelligent City Mobility event, which was held at KIA Oval. In one corner was Professor John Miles from the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, who offered an upbeat vision of the car’s role in the future of urban mobility. In the other corner was Phil Goodwin, Professor of Transport Policy at University College London and the University of the West of England, who took a more sceptical view. The debate be

That’s the kernel of a conversation the Landor LINKS team had earlier this year in Birmingham. A group of senior transport and urban professionals were debating the potential offered by ‘Intelligent Mobility’ to transform the relationship between cars and urban space. They were asking if it will improve the places we live and work, or is a once in a career opportunity going to be wasted?  Unsurprisingly, everyone admitted they had nothing like a complete picture of a

General Motors has confirmed that Kenneth Malmberg, one of its leading authorities on intelligent mobility, will be speaking at Intelligent City Mobility. Connecting the car, and the people inside, with developing city infrastructure is a key starting point for comprehensive Intelligent Mobility services. Malmberg, European Business Development Lead for Infotainment and Telematics at General Motors Europe, will detail GM’s automotive connectivity platform – highlighted by OnStar &nd

Contemplating things that are regarded as completely normal today, but that will be utterly obsolete by the time his young daughter becomes an adult, comedian Richard Herring said in The Metro newspaper on 14 October that: “For example, I doubt my daughter will ever have to drive a car. Either because the world will have run out of fuel or, more likely, cars will drive themselves. “We look at self-driving vehicles with suspicion now,” he added. “But in 18 years’ ti

At this week’s ‘Driverless Vehicles and the City’ conference organised by the Urban Land Institute, Professor John Miles, of Cambridge University, asked participants to think the unthinkable – is promoting modal shift in urban areas away from the private car and towards public transport necessarily the right thing to be doing? Using carbon dioxide emissions per passenger kilometre as a proxy for ‘better’ transport, Miles observed that the current figure for t

Singapore announces today it will develop the technology for platoons of driverless trucks for transporting cargo between port terminals, as part of a long-term vision for autonomous vehicles. The announcement of new memoranda of understanding between the Ministry of Transport and the Singapore port terminals on driverless trucks, and between the ministry and Sentosa Development Corporation on self-driving shuttle services, comes after the approval of trials of self-driving vehicles. 

Twenty European organisations have formed a new alliance with the aim of placing users at the core of transport services, offering them “tailor-made mobility solutions based on their individual needs”. The initiative, named the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Alliance, was announced at the ITS World Congress, taking place this week in Bordeaux, France.  MaaS builds on preliminary work at last year’s European ITS Congress in Helsinki, where it received political support from

Richard Harris, solutions director with Xerox, has been awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award by ERTICO – ITS Europe. He will be inducted into the ITS Hall of Fame during the ITS World Congress in Bordeaux in October. Harris is currentlt international director of ITS (UK). In this role he has overseen the establishment of an international contacts network. Dr Alan Stevens of TRL, chairman of ITS (UK), said: “This recognition is richly deserved. Richard has worked tirelessly a

A couple of weeks ago, when the Ashley Madison data hack was revealed, I felt cold shivers of fear run down my spine, although not for the reasons you may be thinking. Perhaps I should remind some of you that Ashley Madison is the world’s largest online site for adultery. Or at least it was until hackers managed to breach the company’s digital security and obtain the names and addresses of all the people who held accounts there, and proceeded to publish them on the shadowy ‘da

The new TransportXtra brings 2 years of user research, design and development and stunning new features to this sector leading online resource. Transport ‘your way’ You told us you wanted a better way to access the breadth of depth of what TransportXtra offers. Without confusion. Launching today, the new TransportXtra.com intelligently pulls relevant content from across the entire spectrum on a single page. We’ll keep it relevant for you. Tap your specialism Explore Transpor

Strapping on the virtual reality goggles and ‘vest’ is, at first, a highly disconcerting experience.  According to the TCS it usually takes 15-20 minutes to learn to walk properly on the roller pads that counter the user’s walking action to ensure that he or she doesn’t actually go anywhere in the real world when ambling around the virtual one. Other aspects that take some getting use to is the strange lack of limbs in the virtual world – pointing at something

I read with interest Dave Holladay’s Viewpoint (‘Lorry bans to improve cycle safety make good headlines, but do they make good policy?’ LTT 07 Aug).  Dave makes some valid points, such as the fact that a lorry ban in the peak period will not be that effective as six of the capital’s seven cyclist fatalities in collisions with HGVs this year have taken place in the off-peak. Yet his conclusion that the solution is to create segregated routes for lorries is frankly ri

A new group, the Transport Technology Forum, has been formed with the aim of stimulating and facilitating investment, innovation and business growth in transport network technologies. The forum comprises senior representatives from transport technology manufacturers, system integrators and SMEs are represented along with the adjacent telecoms, digital and space technology sectors. The forum also includes stakeholders representing road network operators and authorities, government departments a

Legal barriers stand in the way of testing autonomous vehicles despite a code of practice the Government issued for testing the new technology. Law firm Pinsent Masons highlights that the new code makes clear that autonomous vehicle testers must "observe the road traffic laws that apply when vehicles are used in public places that are not public roads". Pinsent Masons' Ben Gardner says: "Under the Road Traffic Act of 1988 it is an offence to drive a 'mechanically propelled vehicle' an

"Generations of travellers" will be catered for by upgrades to the strategic road network, the DfT vows today after MPs slammed it for allowing river-crossings to be built that could not accommodate future growth. The DfT in a response to the transport select committee says consideration of long-term capacity is now "at the heart of the Government's six new strategic studies on the future of the strategic road network". It says that, "particularly in Manchester's north-west and London's south-w

Car traffic in Great Britain last year increased by the largest amount since 2002, by 1.9% to 244.5 billion vehicle miles, according to the DfT. All motor vehicle traffic was 2.4% higher than the previous year in 2014, but remains below the pre-financial crisis peak of 314 billion miles in 2007. After the first three consecutive annual falls since traffic records began, following the crisis, traffic between 2010 and 2013 was stable, but has shown strong growth again. The DfT statistical releas

Luis (Pilo) Willumsen discusses the opportunities and challenges he foresees in the next decade and beyond The 2007/2008 banking crises was very significant and influenced my view of modelling. I was working with some of the best banks in the world on a toll scheme and requested economic forecasts for the country, which after some reluctance they provided. These were optimistic: the world was going to continue its high speed growth; however, a few months later Lehman Bros collapsed. The banks w

Modelling World 2015 will open, as usual, with a session exploring the key issues on the modelling agenda; this year, we'll be discussing the use of new data sources and their implications for the future of models.  The context in which new data sources are used is ripe for disucssion. Keynote speaker Dr Ed Manley from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London, remains positive, if cautious. “Many of the recent applications of Big Transportatio

The UK’s intelligent mobility sector is being hindered by gaps in the open data available, according to a report commissioned by the Transport Systems Catapult. These gaps must be plugged if the UK is to become a global leader in intelligent mobility, which the report defines as “the smarter, greener and more efficient movement of people and goods around the world”.  There are currently obstacles relating to data access, handling and skills, states the report, prepared by

Technology has revolutionised traffic management and control in the last 30 years and many local authorities have established traffic control centres, with walls of CCTV screens monitoring the road network, supplemented by data from other sources such as in-road sensors. The centres conduct data analysis, put in place operational plans, and feed out information to the public through media such as websites, social media, radio and TV.  But what is the future for these centres in the increas

THE COUNTRY’S media congregated at North Greenwich last week for the launch of the Government’s The pathway to driverless cars report on 11 February (see pp6-7). The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the report’s launch the day before it actually occurred, warned its readers that: “The Highway Code may need to be re-written to stop driverless cars from bringing Britain’s city centres to a halt… Passing distances between cycling and pedestrians may have to be cha

The Government is opening the country’s road network up for the testing of driverless vehicles in an effort to win a big slice of the research and development work in this fast-developing field.  “Driverless vehicles can legally be tested on public roads in the UK today,” declares a review of the legislative environment for driverless vehicles conducted by the DfT and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). “The Department [sic] does not believe th

Driverless cars should prompt a review of proposals to expand road capacity or public transport, according to a new report. The report recommends that all major infrastructure project being planned now should study the impact of driverless cars, given that the first generation of the vehicles has arrived in the U.K, U.S and Singapore, and the progressive roll-out will start this decade and is likely to speed up in a "substantial" way in the 2020s. It acknowledges that "what such an audit

The number of vehicle miles driven in Great Britain grew by a staggering 275 billion miles between 1949 and 2013 – from 29 to 304. In recent years, however, the growth rate has slowed: the additional 34bn vehicle miles driven in the decade to 2007 compares with 62bn in the preceding ten years. The recent recession actually saw traffic levels fall, resulting in traffic volumes in 2013 being only 0.4% higher than they were in 2003.  Figuring out what is shaping the trends in road traff

‘Big data’ can provide valuable information for optimising urban transport planning. Several smartphone apps exist that cyclists can use to record and monitor the journeys they make, typically tracking miles cycled, calories burned, and personal progress. The app Strava goes further and aggregates all user activity into a single map interface that can be viewed within the app and online. This makes it possible to see how Strava users use existing infrastructure, highlighting popular

Car ownership used to be championed by all of the major political parties. But not necessarily any more. There is an increasingly large body of thought, from both ends of the political spectrum, which is coming to the conclusion that the individual freedom of movement that car ownership implies can be achieved with far fewer people actually owning cars. Unlocking the Sharing Economy: an Independent Review, a new report by entrepreneur Debbie Wosskow for the Department of Business, Innovation an

New guidance for transport project promoters on how they should present and assess the economic impacts of their schemes is to be prepared by the DfT, building on the findings of a review by three of the country’s leading transport economists. The changes will include requiring project promoters to present a clear narrative of how their schemes are likely to impact on the economy, and new advice on how job creation impacts should be assessed.  The reforms come in response to the rep

The Government has revised its planning policy to make clear its national traffic forecasts cannot be used as the sole justification for road improvements and that traffic growth should not simply be accommodated, but managed. The DfT response to the campaign against the National Policy Statement on National Networks has led to some revisions to the text in which it says that the policy is not to predict traffic growth "and then provide for that growth regardless". It acknowledges that in

Significant traffic growth on England’s strategic road network (SRN) is forecast under all of the scenarios presented in the Road Investment Strategy. The report presents the result of three different scenarios, tested using the DfT’s National Transport Model. “The scenarios give a range of outcomes for road demand but all point to strong positive growth,” the DfT explains. The range is 27% to 57% growth on the SRN between 2013 and 2040, implying growth of 0.9% – 1

Paul Speirs has been appointed UK managing director of the PTV Group, the German-headquartered transport software company whose products include Visum, Vissim, and Optima. He joins from consultant WSP where he had worked since 2005, latterly as technical director.

The Government has published its long-heralded Road Investment Strategy (RIS) containing £15bn of expenditure to 2021 on 127 major schemes to improve and enlarge the Strategic Road Network (SRN). One aspiration of the vision is a “free-flow core network, with mile a minute speeds increasingly typical”. Nice idea, but how realistic is this? The supporting analysis is decidedly thin. The National Travel Survey shows that per capita travel by all surface modes has changed little

Shared-mobility services are making themselves felt on the transport landscape – with Uber recently valued at a higher market capitalisation than Tesco, it can be safely concluded that we are now witnessing the ‘sharing economy’ come of age, with transport leading the way. The time is therefore right to take stock of where we are now, where events are headed, and what needs to happen to realise the sharing economy’s full potential.  The starting point must be the sh

“Rail, road and bus spending is the way to bridge the north-south divide,” The Observer suggested on 23 November. “While London provides a model of integrated investment, elsewhere growth is slowed by fragmentation and bottlenecks. “The gap between the north and London in quality of transport has found a totemic symbol in the ‘Pacer’ [trains],” the paper added. “But the problem goes beyond the rolling stock. Money has not flowed into infrastructur

Sometimes it feels like travelling by public transport is some kind of endurance and intelligence test, with deliberate obstacles in the way to trip up passengers or to leave them in a state of complete confusion.  I have sought answers to the following: Why should it be close to impossible to find out how much my bus journey is going to cost, before the bus actually arrives and I ask the driver? Why is it that if I get on a bus in London, I can use a smartcard, a contactless car

If Boris Johnson really harbours aspirations to one day lead his party and the country then he must be hoping that Transport for London has got the  modelling of his east-west cycle superhighway plan badly wrong. Councillors on Westminster City Council heard this week that the segregated cycle route could cause major snarl-ups to traffic right outside the Houses of Parliament and on Whitehall. For instance, one bus service is forecast to take an extra 7-10 minutes just to travel the 1km alo

As a veteran of the last three major waves of multi-modal studies I cannot argue with the DfT view that they have not delivered the desired outcome, but I do not agree that the principle of the multi-modal study is fundamentally flawed (‘Multi-modal transport planning hasn’t delivered benefits – DfT’ LTT 31 Oct). I believe we can learn valuable lessons from previous exercises, which may inform and improve the way we proceed in the future. During the last 20 years we have

More than 3,000 parking sensors have been switched on in London’s West End by Westminster City Council. This marks the first phase of a programme that is costing the authority nearly £890,000, which is being funded by paid-for parking revenue.  If the programme is judged a success, a further 7,000 sensors will be rolled out across Westminster’s entire road network on paid-for and disabled bays, said the council. Phase one follows a pilot project in 2012, which covered Sa

Developers of autonomous vehicles must get to grips with the threat posed by computer hackers, a motor industry insurance specialist has warned. Scott Pendry, policy specialist – road safety at the Association of British Insurers (ABI), issued the warning at last week’s ‘Driverless vehicles: from technology ot policy’ conference organised by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS). “A key data challenge is the threat associated with the del

Buses could one day be driverless, a change that could potentially transform operating costs, transport minster Claire Perry has predicted.  “I see a future where driverless buses provide better and more frequent services,” Perry told delegates at last week’s ‘Driverless vehicles: from technology to policy’ conference organised by the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) and Thatcham Research.  “A major component of rural tra

It is becoming universally acknowledged that every transport operator and city government needs a travel app. This has created a rich landscape of innovation in two distinct territories: London and Elsewhere. In London, the decision by Transport for London (TfL) in 2011 to release all of its transport data to developers free has led to a creative explosion followed by Darwinian selection.  Now only the truly evolved apps survive, and so we see established market leaders CityMapper and BusC

In the not so distant future we will be able to use a single smart device to find the fastest way from A to B by any mode. The device will unlock a hire bike, be the key for an electric rental car and our ticket to ride public transport. Who is in charge of the ‘total mobility’ offer will become more important than who provides the individual services. They will be the Amazon of transport. That future is not too far off now in countries like Germany and Austria. But it’s not h

Transport for London has been doing very impressive work recently on appraisal methods, demand analysis, and investigations into the structure of the transport market. Last year, in the APPCG Inquiry Get Britain Cycling, I found one of the most impressive pieces of new thinking was TfL’s suggested methodology for calculating the unfulfilled potential for increasing cycling. Now we again see creative thinking in the new report on the TfL website, Drivers of Demand for Travel in London.* In

As our cities grow and sustainability and environmental concerns become core to providing robust, pleasant and competitive places to live and work, mobility is changing. This is also changing the role of taxis and other shared vehicles. The role of a number of the existing providers, such as the black cabs in London, New York’s famous yellow cabs and even the local private hire/ minicab vehicles in a UK provincial town is being challenged. On 11 June we saw taxi strikes around Europe and m

There must surely have been a sharp intake of breath, a few shivers, a cold feeling of doom among the readers of LTT’s story last month ‘Lawsuits pile up in Oz for toll road forecasts’ (LTT 08 Aug). No fewer than five lawsuits are in progress in Australia against consultants Arup, AECOM, Parsons Brinckerhoff and Booz Allen. They forecast good revenue from toll roads, and investors lost a lot of money when the actual traffic was a lot less than forecast. In two cases companies h

If road safety measures are installed at sites chosen because of their accident (or casualty) record, evaluating their effectiveness isn’t as straightforward as it may at first seem. As well as having to consider the wider trends in accident/casualty numbers, researchers have to contend with regression to the mean (RTM), whereby an abnormally high collision rate during a monitoring period would be expected to fall even without the road safety intervention being made.  Statistical mod

Towns and cities are being invited to bid to become testbeds for driverless vehicles as ministers seek to position the UK as a world leader in the technology. The £10m Government competition will see up to three towns and cities in the UK selected to host trials. Bids must be business-led but include a local authority partner.  The Government says projects could start next January and run for between 18 and 36 months.  “Driverless cars will improve people’s lives a

My taste for genre fiction was built on the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, when the futurologists of the time – right-wing libertarian anarchists such as Robert Heinlein, and creative imagists such as Walt Disney – explored autonomous cars (and roads) as the logical outcome of American automation and mass car ownership. They were technically comprehensible then, and in principle feasible: the Paris metro has for years operated a continuous accelerating step-on-and-off walkwa

Fully automated vehicles may still be decades away but there is a huge amount of interest today in automated technologies and their implications for travel. As well as the technical questions about the transition to a fully automated future, there are more fundamental ones, such as who will control a vehicle’s speed – the occupant or the authorities? Will they lead to a surge in travel demand? And will we actually own automated vehicles, or merely hire them when we need one?  C

Just in case anybody was in any doubt, the era of ‘big data’ is most definitely here, and here to stay. “Eighteen months ago a lot of the data we wanted was either so raw that we needed to put in a lot of work to make sense of the information, or it simply wasn’t released,” says Miller. “But last week we got registration data for buses, for example, from VOSA [the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency], and soon we will be getting real-time feeds from Network R

A t the moment nowhere in the world is it legal to travel from A to B in a road vehicle that doesn’t have someone who is at least nominally in charge in the ‘driver’s seat’. But that is set to change come September, when the state legislature in California (which is currently one of four US states to allow driverless cars to operate on the public highway) is due to pass a law enabling fully automated road vehicles to move people around without even a nominal ‘driver

Cost-benefit calculations of transport schemes include a quantity called the ‘equity value of time’ which, for non-work time only, presumes that all travellers have the same benefit from each minute of time saving. This is by contrast with travel during working hours, which presume that time savings by higher earners are worth much more to the economy than time savings of lower earners, or non-earners. There has been a long but rather low-key discomfort with this situation, but it ha

Public discussion of transport infrastructure investment is being damaged by dubious job creation and economic growth claims, according to the director of a Government-funded research centre on local economic growth. In a keynote paper to last week’s Modelling World conference, Henry Overman said much greater discipline needed to be imposed on the claims made by policy-makers about transport investment’s impact on the economy. Overman is professor of economic geography at the Londo

Business secretary Vince Cable today opened a new innovation centre for 'smart transport' technology that aims to improve the movement of people and goods whilst generating up to £90bn per year for the UK within a decade. The 'Imovation Centre’ has been established to support business growth in this emerging market, to position the UK as a global leader in intelligent mobility products and services -- from driverless vehicles to integrated logistics, 'sentiment-mapping' of social me

A new national centre for transport modelling and testing opens in Milton Keynes next month, designed to help UK businesses to develop new ways of moving people and goods. The 36,000 sq ft 'Imovation' Centre, part of the Transport Systems Catapult, will open on the 12th June to provide a national hub for transport modelling and testing and the development of new methods of integrating transport systems. To mark its opening, there will be a two-week festival  of presentations of projects in

MPs have questioned the value of the DfT’s road traffic forecasts and urged the Department to open up the National Transport Model, which produces the forecasts, to more scrutiny. The recommendations come in two new reports from the House of Commons transport committee, one on the Government’s roads policy and the other on the draft National Policy Statement (NPS) for national networks, which was published last December (LTT 23 Dec 13).   The committee calls for “wi

One of the more impressive if less admirable creations of the British tradition of governance is calculated ambiguity, delicate and almost invisible, crafted to create both the appearance of a promise and the alibi for breaking it. But unnoticed ambiguity leads to confusion, while understood ambiguity leads to subtle insights into the interrelationships of things and ideas. So how about the word mobile? Its primary use was as an adjective, embodied in the question ‘are you mobile?’,

Two hundred years ago it was hard to move much faster than walking speed. Horse-drawn carriages made slow progress on poor roads. With the coming of the railways in the 1830s, we were able to move faster. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the motorcar on improved roads set us on course for mass mobility.  Travel has always been constrained by time, the 24 hours of the day with many activities to be fitted in. An hour a day seems to have been the average amount of time for travel fo

What is the biggest change in the field of accessibility planning in the past few years? According to Simon Court, projects director at Basemap and a man who has been involved in the development of accessibility planning software for well over a decade, it’s the arrival of the ‘open data’ revolution. “Datasets used to be a bit of a cash cow for us, where it would often cost of thousands of pounds to buy the data, but we could then on-sell it to our customers. Then open da

David Metz canvasses for changes in land values to be the measure of benefits rather than the traditional time savings (ibid). I canvassed for the same in the now defunct journal, The Surveyor, in editions on the 8 and 15 December 1972.   Among other things I pointed out that the standard cost benefit analysis would not capture benefits in a range of circumstances. Suppose we have an uncongested road upon which traffic doubled over 20 years whilst remaining uncongested. Time savings would

The draft National Policy Statement for national networks sets out its stall as follows: “The NPS sets out the Government’s vision and policy for the future development of nationally significant infrastructure projects on the national road and rail networks (including strategic rail freight interchanges).” Does this suggest that the NPS sets out a national integrated transport strategy, or that it sheds light on the Government’s approach to developing our national networ

Roads minister Robert Goodwill this week responded to the professional debate about the Government’s road planning, saying ministers had no intention of returning to the “outdated” policy of ‘predict and provide’ road-building. His comments come after bodies such as the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT), the Transport Planning Society (TPS), and the Local Government Technical Advisers Group (TAG), all criticised the DfT’s draft Natio

Transport planners, local authorities, and public transport and environmental lobby groups have called on the DfT to rewrite its National Policy Statement on national networks, saying the draft version is too pro-road and dismissive of demand management and travel behaviour change measures. The NPS will provide the context for the Secretary of State’s decision-making on Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) such as improvements to the strategic road network (SRN) and rail

There can’t be many civil servants who have gone on to lead revolutions. But David Metz hopes to be one. The DfT’s former chief scientist wants to overthrow the current way we appraise transport projects. Time savings for travellers are typically the biggest benefit of a transport scheme and, once given a monetised value, they help drive the benefit:cost ratio calculation. But Metz says time savings are transient and the major lasting benefit of transport investment is the uplift it

The development of automated cars could drive further road traffic growth and damage the prospects for public transport, academics said this week. “It may reasonably be surmised that technology that makes it easier to move about by car will serve to stimulate its use,” say Scott Le Vine and Professor John Polak of Imperial College London’s Centre for Transport Studies in a report for the Integrated Transport Commission. “There is also a risk that public transport finds

Autonomous cars, driverless cars, automated cars – whatever you call them (and yes, it does make a difference) they are the hot topic in transport today.  Carmakers are investing millions of pounds in research & development, mock towns are being built to test automation concepts, fact-finding hearings are taking place, laws are being passed – even international treaties are being re-opened. This is the subject of a new Occasional Paper that John Polak and I have completed f

Thousands of drivers a week are receiving penalty charge notices (PCNs) for ignoring an experimental ban on general traffic crossing a bridge in York city centre. Since the end of August the Lendal bridge has been restricted to buses, taxis, cyclists, pedestrians and emergency vehicles between 10.30 and 17.00 seven days a week.  The ban’s aims are to reduce congestion, create a bus priority corridor, and improve the environment for pedestrian and cyclists. Figures show that between

It may be pushing it to suggest that the humble pedestrian is an endangered species but official figures do not make happy reading for those who believe in the power of two feet. According to the Government’s National Travel Survey the number of trips we make by foot each year fell more than a quarter (27%) between 1995/97 and 2012.  Huge numbers of people enjoy walking as a recreational activity but walking advocates have long struggled to get it taken seriously as a transport mode.

Many traffic forecasts for major road schemes are inaccurate, with modellers appearing to have particular difficulty predicting traffic levels on new bypasses and the roads they relieve, according to a major study of recently-completed Highways Agency schemes.  The report by consultant Atkins summarises post-opening project evaluations (POPEs) of more than 70 Highways Agency major schemes delivered between 2002 and 2010. They comprise bypasses, online widenings, junction improvements and u

Thanks to our Ukrainian correspondent for sending in this image of a tram timetable from the city of Krivoy Rog. In case you’re having difficulty understanding what it says, let us help you...The first tram on route 10 departs at 07.04 and then operates at 101-minute intervals until the last service at 20.36. Route 11 operates at the same intervals but routes 12, 16, and 19 have better frequencies, operating every 67 minutes, 76 minutes, and 52 minutes respectively. Now the exam question:

A European standard for  road signs is to be proposed next year by two road safety bodies.  EuroRAP (the European Road Assessment Programme) and EuroNCAP (the European New Car Assessment Programme) say the standard should remove “unnecessary inconsistencies in fonts, colours, sizing and shape that have crept in when nations have implemented basic safety signs defined in international conventions [the Vienna Convention] such as ‘Stop’, ‘Give Way’, speed li

Have you ever had a visit from a personal travel planner? No? Well, if your doorbell rings next summer (and you live in England), there’s a reasonable chance you’ll be greeted by a cheery adviser, eager to offer you maps and advice about local cycle routes and bus services. And, if you’re really lucky, you may even receive a free seven-day bus ticket!  Thanks to funding from the DfT’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund, perhaps as many as 200,000 homes will be targete

The astute Times reporter Philip Pank wrote last week ‘Funding cuts fear as cycling is forecast to drop’. The funding cuts were not in any official statement, but the forecasts were as official as you can get – results from the Department for Transport’s National Travel Model (NTM), announced in Parliament by the transport minister, Robert Goodwill. The suggestion was that although cycle trips would rise a little between now and 2015, both trips and mileage travelled by b

Debate continues over both the affordability of transport investments and the best way of meeting future travel demand to achieve sustainable outcomes. We entered the 21st century with social demands for travel increasing, but serious economic constraints and growing environmental concerns seeming to restrain our ability to chart strategic progress. ‘Piecemeal’ and ‘ad-hoc’ are words that many of us can readily associate with transport investment. This begs the question

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last week published its new assessment of man’s influence on the earth’s climate. The text of the Summary for policymakers document was agreed at a meeting of scientists, Government and UN officials in Stockholm and draws on the findings contained in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, which has not yet been released.  “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal and since the 1950s many of the obs

New ways of detecting and prioritising cyclists at signalised junctions are now proven and ready to incorporate in traffic control systems, this week’s JCT Traffic Signals Symposium heard. The moves have come in response to the growing inability of existing vehicle detection systems to pick up cyclists using traditional inductive loop and magnetometer approaches.  The JCT event at Warwick University heard of two new approaches, the use of mini-radar from the UK’s Clearview Tra

High-speed rail will deliver huge benefits to the economies of cities where stations are built, according to a report commissioned by HS2 Ltd, the Government company set up to promote the plans. Consultants KPMG and Connected Economics Ltd have tried to predict the impact the line will have on the connectivity of businesses and the labour market. In a press release announcing the findings Richard Threlfall, KPMG’s head for infrastructure, building and construction, said the work showed &

Fittingly, it was while daydreaming on a bus that I glanced out of the window and saw the slogan: ‘Buses Stop but Dreams Don’t’. The bus moved on and I puzzled about it for the rest of the day – what on earth could it mean? As a metaphor, it didn’t quite make sense. Was it some misguided road safety campaign? In the end I retraced the journey and discovered the source, one of those moving posters on bus stops. It was an advertisement for Middlesex University. 

Platoons of lorries controlled by only one driver could be trialled on UK roads. The DfT says platoons could have “huge benefits” if they can be safely implemented. “The potential long-term benefits – reducing road congestion by reducing the gaps between vehicles and thus increasing road capacity, reducing fuel consumption and carbon dioxide, and reducing accidents by eliminating human error – can be quantified more accurately by conducting an on-road trial,”

Edinburgh’s TRAMS are expected to take longer than the bus to travel from the city’s airport to the city centre. Municipally-owned Lothian Buses advertises its Edinburgh Airport bus service 100 as offering a journey time of 30 minutes to the city centre. Meanwhile,  modelling of the tram route by consultant Parsons Brinckerhoff suggests that a fully laden tram could complete the journey in 32-33 minutes. The airport service will continue to operate after the £776m tram ro

Oxfordshire County Council ‘Park and bike’ commuting encouraged Working in association with the universities and hospitals in Headington, Oxfordshire County Council has launched the Oxonbike cycle hire scheme. Using ground-breaking self-service technology, the Oxonbike scheme builds on the 500-space expansion of the Thornhill Park and Ride site by encouraging “park and bike” commuting. The scheme is operated by Grand Scheme and currently consists of 30 bikes at seven lo

The DfT’s top civil servant has rejected MPs’ suggestions that the business case for the Government’s high-speed rail plans has been artificially inflated using favourable assumptions. Permanent secretary Philip Rutnam took issue with the suggestion from members of the House of Commons public accounts committee during a hearing into the National Audit Office’s recent report, High Speed 2: a review of early programme preparation (LTT  17 May). The committee session

‘Fusion: feasibility and the future of transport’ was the title of the Independent Transport Commission’s annual lecture held last week at London’s Science Museum. The audience, which included roads minister Stephen Hammond, was treated to a double-bill of Network Rail chairman Professor Richard Parry-Jones and Professor Steve Cowley, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) in Oxfordshire (see panel).

Copenhagen is leading research to improve how cyclists’ behaviour is represented in micro-simulation traffic models.  Danish consultant COWI and German transport software developer PTV Group have worked with authorities in the Danish capital on the research programme. The work was described last week to PTV’s international user group meeting in London     by Søren Frost, a transport planner with COWI. Frost said cycling trips had boomed in Copenhage

The Mayor of London’s roads task force is due to publish its findings shortly, addressing the contentious issue of how we best use London’s roads not just for potentially competing means of travel but also as key contributors to a high quality public realm.     The task force’s analysis suggests major challenges ahead: even if all the planned improvements in the Mayor’s transport strategy are implemented, traffic congestion is projected to significan

Two major projects to develop new transport modelling capabilities are underway, with the DfT launching a review of the National Transport Model and the Government’s new Transport Systems Catapult centre developing plans for a national transport modelling facility. The DfT’s National Transport Model Futures project is considering the way ahead for the National Transport Model, which was originally launched in 2003. Issues include whether the model should in future only be capable o

Swindon Borough Council Cycle Loan Scheme Swindon’s cycle loan scheme is an innovative and engaging project that allows commuters to borrow a bike for free before deciding whether to buy one outright. The scheme is run by an organisation called Recycles, a social enterprise set up as part of the Salvation Army in Swindon. Recycles provides a pool of 30 bikes of various shapes, sizes and styles, including electric and folding bikes. The enterprise also provides employment for people who

With video cameras replacing people on most count surveys over the past decade or so, the lag between fieldwork and final results has increased as data processing does not begin on the survey day and, whilst the improvements in data quality, verifiability and potential scale are recognised as a worthwhile trade-off, it is nonetheless the greatest challenge to overcome in our sector. This delay between survey fieldwork and provision of data increases with the scale and complexity of the data coll

Traditionally urban space design has always favoured vehicle movement over pedestrian movement and the need for high quality transportation infrastructure in order to promote urban growth and to facilitate the movement of goods and people is well understood and illustrated in every aspect of today’s modern cities. But now we are witnessing a shift in design trends and policy and it is no longer the case that the car rules supreme; indeed, urban space designers are increasingly becoming mor

Sydney is Australia’s largest and most densely populated city, with a population of 4.6 million. The city’s central business district (CBD) covers an area of approximately 2 square miles, is bounded on two sides by water and contains 32 million square metres of floor space. More than 180,000 people live in the city of Sydney, sharing the space with about 20,000 businesses. Every day approximately 400,000 people arrive to work in this area, and another 500,000 travel to the city for s

Companies such as TomTom possess enormous databases with vehicle-movements based on GPS data to predict traffic jams in real time and, with the introduction of public transport smart cards, large databases with public transport movements are a potential source of useful matrix building data. The most interesting new data source, however, is GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) location data, which is location-based information retrieved from mobile phones. Each mobile phone is at all m

Over the past 12 months, I have visited over 100 offices around the UK, Indo-Asia and the Middle East presenting to clients, local authorities and staff of all levels and backgrounds. I have been asked many questions on data collection, the relative merits of types of survey and what impact new technologies will have on the sector. In return I ask two simple questions: What do you want from a transport survey company? What are you going to use the data for? In response to this first question, t

How do people navigate through a building, a train station or an airport? What happens when you need to evacuate an area, or if a number of exits have to be shut for various reasons? Will the occupants still make it out safely?    MassMotion enables engineers to create complex pedestrian simulations very easily using standard 3D model data from software such as Revit or ArchiCAD. Engineers can then quickly perform sensitivity analysis and ‘what-if’ scenarios, measure

Traffic managers know from experience what traffic is going to be like during a specific time and day of the week and can therefore handle incidents that occur regularly. They use real-time information from detector data, floating car data (FCD) and cameras. However, these data records only cover a certain part of the area. A daily challenge – because if something unusual happens or if several unprecedented incidents occur at once – traffic managers will get stressed quickly. That is

Guildford Borough Council has invited tenders for a  transport study of the area that will use a technique known as ‘backcasting’. The approach involves envisioning future desirable patterns of travel behaviour and working backwards to develop an implementation plan to deliver them. Guildford contrasts this with conventional transport strategy work that involves forecasting future travel patterns and then developing investment programmes in response to the forecast trends. Th

Brazilian cities are celebrated for their excellent bus services and São Paulo is no exception. The city has a complex surface transit network and, over the years, the various reserved bus lanes that have been installed have greatly improved bus speeds and reliability. However, solutions need to evolve to cope with increasing demand: the M’Boi Mirim bus corridor was built in 2003 and, ten years later, it remains the only way to get from the southwest districts of São Paulo to

As a modeller I am used to being challenged by technology, and I’m not just talking about getting used to Windows 8. Newer computers enabling much faster turnaround times and software using multiple processors; advances in algorithms allowing complexities in my models that were previously not possible; and new data collection technologies not just increasing the data volumes available but sometimes requiring me to go back to basics and really understand the statistical qualities of the dat

Reading through the articles in this data and modelling supplement, one thing soon becomes abundantly clear – the days when modellers were exclusively exercised with predicting how vehicles would move are over. Which is not to say, of course, that modelling the behaviour of cars and buses and so on has suddenly become of no importance. But what is quite clear from the industry experts whose ideas you will soon be reading about is that today’s modeller is primarily concerned with the

ELGIN has entered into an agreement with Nokia to provide data on over two million road works to its smartphone and sat-nav users. Nokia has chosen roadworks.org, which incorporates data from over 140 local highway authorities, the Highways Agency and Transport for London, to be the source of data on UK incidents and accidents for its real-time traffic service HERE Traffic, available in the UK and 33 other countries. Nokia will use the local roadworks data to inform their predictive algorithms

Satellite navigation service provider Navevo has launched what it claims is the world’s first ‘cyclist alert’ safety feature as part of the latest version of its ProNav satnav product for HGV drivers. The software has been developed in association with Transport for London to provide a commercial vehicle driver with an audible and visual alert as they approach a junction or section of road that has been determined to be a location where there are regularly high volumes of HGV

Westminster City Council is to revamp its parking and loading policies with the aim of making the service friendlier to drivers. On-street staff will act as marshals whose main task will be to direct traffic to the nearest available space where they can park, load or unload legally. The marshals will make use of real-time information about the availability of bays supplied by sensors that detect whether a bay is occupied or empty (LTT 31 Aug 12). The sensors can communicate information on th

The South East of England is to be a testbed for new forms of ‘smart’ rail ticketing. The proposal is outlined in the DfT’s new ‘door-to-door’ transport strategy that aims to simplify the journey experience through measures such as new ticketing, better information and improving interchange between modes. Speaking on the day the strategy was launched, transport minister Norman Baker told LTT: “What’s really exciting about it for me is the fact it&rsquo

“For tomorrow's transport we will rely far less on privately-owned vehicles (notably private cars),” Peter Miller, CEO of Ipswich-based ‘data visualisation’ company ITO World says. No, in tomorrow’s 'smart cities' we will access a rich variety of shared physical devices (including buses, trains, ‘Boris bikes’ and car clubs) using information services based on detailed transport models built from both government data (which are now suddenly being released

Local transport minister Norman Baker has backed an initiative to make data on road works available to road users across England and Wales through one website. ADEPT (the Association of Directors of Environment, economy, Planning and Transport) has also urged highway authorities to participate in the site, roadworks.org. Of 174 highway authorities in England and Wales, 143 have signed up.

If you are near to an internet browser as you read this, type the search term ‘Peak Car’ into Google and have a look at the top two or three page listings. Now repeat the test with the search term ‘High Speed 2’. At the time of writing, the top listing for ‘Peak Car’ is a Wikipedia article on the subject. Similarly, the Wikipedia article on High Speed 2 is ranked second by Google, just below the official HS2 website, but above the Department for Transport&rsqu

Transport has always fascinated Dave Merrett. As a child he ran the school transport society; it wasn’t all steam trains, there was Scalectrix too. He went on to become a civil engineer in British Rail’s bridge design and assessment team. Today, at the age of 58, he still works part-time for Amey on Network Rail’s bridge assessment contract. But it’s through his political career as a York city councillor that Merrett has been able to put his wider ideas about transport in

An Academic’s suggestion that consultants should be penalised for producing “significantly inaccurate and misleading” forecasts has generated a huge debate within transport planning circles. The suggestion of penalties was made by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg in an academic paper reported by LTT just before Christmas. Since then, his ideas have been debated across a number of web-based international discussion forums for transport planners. Many contributors have questioned the

“I wish it becomes true ‘the day the transportation forecasters are penalised’. The majority of toll road revenues are not meeting the goals set by the consultants.” “I agree, the transport planners are in plight. If they produce realistic numbers, the client turns around and says, ‘Maybe you would like to revise these?’ We have even worked backwards, often devising methods to arrive at the ‘suitable’ figures. The vision is myopic: immedia

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin. This is a story about how the Department for Transport spectacularly mishandled the competition for the Inter City West Coast railway franchise, through a mixture of cock-up, confusion and – perhaps worst of all – a failure by some middle-ranking officials to report concerns about the process to higher management or ministers. Once transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin became aware of the mistakes he had no choice but to cancel the awa

Transport consultants should be penalised for producing “significantly inaccurate and misleading” forecasts of transport project costs and benefits, according to a project management expert. Many forecasts are “garbage”, says Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor and the founding director of BT’s Centre for Major Programme Management at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Flyvbjerg’s international research has documented major inaccuracies in the cos

Changes to company car taxation in the late 1990s and early 2000s caused a huge drop in car mileage and goes some way to explaining why car traffic stabilised before the economic downturn hit in 2008, according to research published this week.   The report, which aims to inform the debate about ‘peak car’, was commissioned by the RAC Foundation, the Independent Transport Commission, the Office of Rail Regulation and Transport Scotland. Its authors are Scott Le Vine, a res

THE HIGHWAYS Agency and traffic data processing company INRIX are currently halfway through a year-long trial to examine the potential to merge traffic data from different souces into a single coherent information stream. The 12-month trial, which is due to be completed next spring, involves merging information from the HA’s fixed on-road sensor network and data from INRIX’s ‘floating vehicle’ fleet to update the HA’s National Traffic Information Service (NTIS). Th

A new website has been launched enabling people to search for a new home on the basis of commuting times by public transport.  Users of MySociety’s Mapumental Property website type in the postcode of their workplace and then input their desired maximum commute time. A map, which has been over four years in development (LTT 30 May 08), then reveals locations that meet the commuting time criterion. Users can then view on the website the properties available to buy or rent in the are

The Government continues to use policy and funding to encourage local authorities and operators to think smart when it comes to public transport. It provides the national vision that combines the needs of the travelling public with its overall aims for reducing congestion and CO2 emissions, and the subsequent beneficial impact all of this can have on the economy, including access to employment. Smart ticketing is recognised as one way of encouraging more and better use of public transport. Th

Reading Borough Council has led the delivery of a successful local sustainable transport fund (LSTF) large funding package of £21m for the Reading urban area. The funding is a catalyst for delivery of much needed sustainable travel facilities, and also a means of rolling out a whole new wave of technology driven solutions. But for this to be a success, it can’t be a case of “build it and they will come”, install and hope, or just experimental projects. This investment nee

Trying unsuccesfully to check my emails in my favourite front seat on the top deck of the 243 bus, the sad refrain of Joni Mitchell’s  “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” started running round and round my head, accompanied by an initially unexplained mood of dark discontent. It was the difficulty with emails that gave me the clue about the cause. I had done something really stupid. I had downloaded the new operating system for my iPhone (&lsq

Red routes, cheaper bus fares, and better road access to motorways are some of the initiatives being assessed for the ten-year circa £1bn West Yorkshire Plus Transport Fund. The fund’s primary objective will be to maximise employment and productivity growth across West Yorkshire (the latter measured in impact on Gross Value Added per £ invested). Gary Bartlett, Leeds City Council’s chief officer for highways and transportation, told the city council’s cabinet tha

There is “strong potential” for tags to be regularly placed within road surfaces to provide an in-situ record of how they have been built and maintained, according to TRL. A trial carried out by TRL with EnterpriseMouchel on the M4 has identified that it is possible to insert radio-frequency identification tags containing information during the laying of road pavements at low cost without damaging them. TRL says that tagging roads surfaces “clearly has strong potential to ass

Ali Clabburn has been running liftshare.com, probably the UK’s best-known car sharing facilitator, since 1997, and now heads a company with over 20 full-time employees. And now he is branching out by offering personalised travel planning services that include car sharing, but are by no means limited to it. The new product, called myPTP, is something that Clabburn has been thinking about for around eight years now, he says, but has only really come together as a viable business opportunity

I'm writing this on the way back from a first-ever visit to a political party conference, in this case the Conservatives’. Given that I’d been invited to speak at a fringe event on the often-vexed subject of free parking, I was indebted to the Chancellor for having earlier set the scene by railing against a ‘something for nothing’ culture. On the train up to Birmingham, I’d encountered a report in The Times headlined “DfT ‘could be sued over growth fore

The city of Belo Horizonte is gearing up to host the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, where the addition of a deluge of visitors to a population of over 2.5 million means that the issue of public transport is taking high priority. Among the plans is the implementation of a set of bus priority corridors, following the BRT models already in operation in even larger cities such as Curitiba and Bogotá. A system redefinition, along with appropriate traffic signal reprogramming, is a great opportunit

The latest escalation of busway success is, in part, because a number of key technologies have been used to ensure that guided bus routes are successful in providing a reliable, fast and frequent service that ensures a positive customer experience. This is, of course, key to maximising the potential of BRT and is, therefore, vital in promoting modal shift and increasing BRT’s uptake as an alternative to the car, particularly in heavily congested areas. Vix has worked with many of the pion

It is always tricky to prove that property and land values have increased due to new transport investment rather than other external factors and so, for my Masters dissertation, my research set out to find out whether BRT can lead to property value changes. Most of you will be aware that there have been studies examining the link between transport investment and property values for projects such as the Jubilee Line Extension and Croydon Tramlink but there is very little research available for B

Internet search engine giant Google has introduced a new function to its Google Maps service for Android mobile phones that will provide UK cyclists with audible turn-by-turn directions during their bike trips. Riders, Google says, can now “mount their device on their handlebars, see upcoming turns and use speaker mode to hear voice-guided directions.” The turn-by-turn directions can even help you avoid steep hills, the company adds. The service, which is already available to cyclist

It might be obvious, but it’s worth saying over and over again: information is power, and people can’t do what they don’t know is possible, or use what they don’t know is available. The significance of this simple truth for transport and travel behaviour is fundamental to its future, and never more so than at the present time of potentially game-changing developments in communication technology and the use of data. We are living in the middle of an information revolution

Siemens has launched what it terms an ‘alternative’ traffic detection system, WiMag, that uses magnetic disturbances to detect vehicles and low power wireless technology to transmit data to host controllers. Using a battery-powered wireless magnetometer sensor that lies beneath the surface of the road, the WiMag system utilises disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field to detect passing and stationary vehicles, and relays the information to the traffic controller without the

Car insurance comparison website Confused.com has launched a new app that, it claims, ‘mirrors’ in-car telematics technology used to monitor driving performance. “This potentially allows good drivers to benefit from cheaper car insurance premiums by allowing drivers who are interested in telematics but are unsure about installing a little black box in their car to ‘try before you buy’,” the company says. The new MotorMate app has been developed in a partners

The latest accessibility data from the DfT tells us that the average minimum travel time to the seven key services analysed (employment, primary school, secondary school, further education, GP, hospital, food store) was 14 minutes by public transport/walking, nine minutes by cycling and six minutes by car. These times were 33 seconds longer than in 2010 for public transport/waking and around 12 seconds longer than in 2010 for both cycling and by car. As in previous years, the statistics tell us

I have a soft spot for London Bridge. The station, that is. I first set foot on it early one Friday morning in the summer of 1983 – a bleary-eyed 12-year old, having travelled with my dad on the overnight train from Edinburgh for a weekend’s trainspotting in the capital. I watched agog as train after train pulled in, disgorging thousands of commuters on their way to work in the City. I’d never seen anything like it. This spectacle of human life continues today. During the wee

Sign supplier Mobile Traffic Solutions (MTS) has developed a portable Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) for hire. The system features real-time data collection, automatic number plate recognition, CCTV and variable message signs, and offers a method of measuring volumes of traffic and other associated data. The MTS system includes T-25 portable Automatic Number Plate (ANPR) camera stations, which provide an autonomous platform for use anywhere across a road network as they are powered by s

"Open access call for DfT model” was the main headline in LTT’s report on the ‘Modelling World’ conference in the last issue. The story was about my suggestion that the National Transport Model, the NTM, should be made publicly available, and how the DfT response so far, from Taro Hallworth and Robin Cambery, was cautious but not ruling it out (what LTT called a “definite maybe”). I have to confess that the ‘call’ consisted of 16 words added q

A new iPhone app has been launched that will provide users with real-time information on arrival and departure times for all of London’s 19,000 bus stops along 700 routes. Telent, which has launched the app, was awarded a contract in 2009 by Transport for London to develop the Countdown technology that provides real-time information at the bus stops for internet-based and mobile phone content. The new app, called BUStop London, can be integrated with social networking sites such as Twitt

TomTom has published information from what it claims is the “world’s largest database of historic travel times data” suggesting the Leeds-Bradford area and London are in the top ten congested cities in Europe. Tom Westendorp of TomTom told Modelling World that in 2011 vehicles with its satellite navigation devices provided data on 75 million trips and 179 million driving hours. This information has been used to compile the TomTom congestion index for Europe, published to provi

The idea that the advent of ‘big data’, meaning data sources such as people’s mobile phones, travel smartcards and so on, will fundamentally transform the way in which transport models work, was hotly debated at the Modelling World event. Academic Joan Serras from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, suggested that it might. “There is at present a surge of big data which is providing a starting point to get to help us get to grips with c

The DfT has remained on the fence in response to a suggestion from Professor Phil Goodwin that the Department’s National Transport Model should be made publically available, as is already the case with the Treasury’s economic model. Responding to Goodwin’s suggestion at LTT’s Modelling World event last week, Taro Hallworth, economic adviser at the DfT, said: “Anything is possible. I will talk to my boss about what this would mean in terms of cost… I would li

Maximising the value of transport data by making it freely available in a timely manner for IT developers is a “significant organisational challenge” according to Transport for Greater Manchester. Speaking at LTT’s Open Data, Transport and Cities conference in Manchester last week, David Hytch, information systems director at TfGM, said: “We carried out a data audit. Then we identified the limitations to sharing it.” Hytch said that money, skills and staff time,

I recently retired after 40 years in transport consultancy, mainly in transport planning. During that time I have seen transport planning grow from a discipline into a profession, with many fine achievements to its name. But I reflect on two points – how good are we at transport planning and do we deliver good transport as a result? Transport planning comprises four basic elements – (1) analysis of a transport problem to identify and quantify its extent; (2) development of options t

A forecast often has the intended implication ‘this is what we think will happen’ and a scenario is ‘this is what we think could happen’. The really important reasons for using scenarios are when there is a significant degree of uncertainty or disagreement about the future, or when an official forecast lacks credibility or consensus, or when the future path of policy itself is undetermined, or when ‘thinking outside the box’ is essential because a described fu

New tools, techniques and processes are emerging which bring a new modelling & visualisation solutions at lower cost. There are new ways to use data to model, measure, map and analyse. This year, Modelling World is doing more than take a simple step further but taking a committed leap to bring this new picture together. Join us at Modelling World 2012 and learn what you’ll need to thrive it this fast-evolving environment! Questions that will be answered: Do major

Hertfordshire County Council is currently in the throes of implementing a highly advanced automatic vehicle location and real-time passenger information system across its bus network, as well as technology that will enable the county’s buses to handle a range of advanced ticketing options, including smartcards and, ultimately, 2D barcode tickets held on mobile phones. Which work seems, self-evidently, to be strong evidence that Hertfordshire is keen to  improve its bus network. Diggin

Both transport and urban planning require broad ranging consideration in their own right. The interaction of good accessibility provided by transport infrastructure facilitating development and resulting in travel demand and stress on transport networks, is the reason why each cannot be considered in isolation. Responding to the Eddington and Stern reviews, the DfT has set challenges to tackle climate change, while focusing on those investments that deliver the greatest economic benefits. The n

3D visualisation – as its name suggests – is a type of computer animation used for developing masterplan and concept designs, community consultation displays, presentations to approval authorities, or to accompany sales and marketing presentations. Communication tool An excellent communication tool, it enables people to more easily understand technical scenarios, can be applied to ‘safety in design’ methodologies, and above all, is a visually exciting, value-adding wa

All three junctions were heavily congested in both peaks and lie on a main commuter route for the area. The locality of a large school and its associated morning drop-off points were major factors contributing to a morning queue regularly extending over half a mile on the worst affected approach. A small gyratory system operating within the middle junction, restricted road width over a bridge, and the presence of heavily used bus stops within the network of junctions all contributed to the diffi

The challenge for movement and place professionals is to help make viable plans today for an uncertain tomorrow. Movement, living, working and leisure patterns are morphing faster than ever before on the back of rapid technological advances and social change. How can we model today for digitally-savvy generations whose behaviour patterns evolve as rapidly as new technologies? Yet, innovators in the ever-expanding circle of professionals involved in making better places are rising to these comple

Advocates of ‘smarter choice’ travel behaviour change policies are preparing their own   guidance on modelling the impact of the measures because they say the DfT’s advice is too negative. The DfT’s Modelling smarter choices guidance was published last month and sets out how the Department expects transport modellers to assess the impact of  measures such as travel plans, car clubs and car sharing schemes. But critics say its tone is too downbeat. Prepa

ParkMap 5.5, the latest version of the software for making and managing Traffic Orders from Buchanan Computing, has been upgraded to incorporate the recommendations of the DfT’s new policy document Signing the Way, as well as its recent consultation on traffic orders. “ParkMap has been upgraded to meet all these aspirations, and to cater for shared use and other complex new restrictions recently authorised for use throughout England,” Buchanan says. “Particularly importan

Relesing data to inform travel choices is nothing new. It has been part of the transport sector’s offer from George Bradshaw’s mid-19th Century aggregation of timetable data from some 150 rail companies to the Traveline initiative to provide comprehensive journey information on the deregulated bus market at the turn of this century. What is now referred to as the open data agenda presents opportunities to provide better information to the public to inform their travel choices but al

Vehicle manufacturer General Motors has announced that its first version of a semi-automated (or ‘self-driving’) car could be commercially available in as few as three years, with a fully automated model potentially on the road by the end of the decade. Initially GM is talking about providing customers with a level of automation that could enable a vehicle to drive itself only on certain types of roads, such as motorways. Dubbed the ‘super cruise’ system by the company, t

Consultant WYG has appointed Norman Johnston (pictured) as technical director specialising in intelligent transport systems. Johnston joins WYG from Halcrow Group, where he was sales director.

The rules governing disbursement of LSTF grant are, at first sight, relatively straightforward. Each sum allocated to a local authority for each financial year of the four-year funding stream must be spent in that year, or returned to the DfT. There is some flexibility, in that funding can be moved from one project to another, provided that all of the capital funding stays in the capital pot, and all the revenue funding in the revenue pot. But that’s about as far as it goes, meaning that s

Satnav provider TomTom has released a new ‘speed cam’ app for the iPhone, giving drivers access to fixed and mobile speed camera alerts. “The app improves safety by keeping users informed about speed limits during their journey,” TomTom says. “Consequently, it helps users to avoid costly speeding fines and, in some countries, points on their driving licence.” In use, the new app informs drivers of their speed, the speed limit, the type of camera ahead and the

The US state of Nevada has become what is believed to be the world’s first government body to award a licence to allow a driverless car to be tested on public roads. Internet search engine giant Google has obtained the licence to allow it to continue to test a modified Toyota Prius that uses video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to ‘see’ other traffic. Google engineers have previously tested the car on the streets of California but, for thos

Movement and mobility in an information age will, says Peter Miller, CEO of ITO World and a speaker at Modelling World, revolve around access to a range of travel modes – a travel portfolio – and not around car ownership. Things will, he says, be very different. Miller's key interests lie with real-time transport data standards. His long-term vision, smarter decision making through innovative use of data, is on the cusp of being realised. 'Research shows that young people aren't buy

The localism agenda brings new challenges for movement and place professionals: to show how accessibility, quality of place and local movement networks deliver demonstrable economic and social value. There are strong correlations between the way space is planned and its economic impact. Tim Stonor, managing director at consultancy Space Syntax, will explore new tools that measure this complex matrix of urban value at Modelling World. These tools reveal the crucial contribution of local movemen

Jonathan Tricker of Parsons Brinckerhoff will be using his Modelling World presentation to introduce a new ‘scenario testing’ and modelling tool that enables stakeholders and the public to explore and assess options for growth, delivering an empirical evidence base to support development decisions. The GIS-based model is capable of rapid development scenarios with a focus on sustainability and economic viability, rather than urban form, says Tricker. The model’s strength lies i

The National Transport Model provides a systematic means of comparing the consequences of alternative national transport policies, or widely-applied local transport policies, against background scenarios which take into account the major factors affecting future patterns of travel. The Department for Transport has recently been urged to review its NTM by a leading traffic expert who claimed the model’s forecast of major road traffic growth in London is 'implausible'.  As reported in L

The explosion in the availability of digital and online data is opening up many opportunities for cities, city planners, and transport professionals, and Modelling World will present many opportunities to explore the options. Open data may change the future in ways that seem as inconceivable today as the rise of texting, Google and Twitter did only five years ago. Most cities are beginning to look at how they should make data available; and at how they capture, curate, an

A key issue for modellers in today's fast changing world is: how do we recognise fundamental changes in social, cultural and economic trends early enough to model them? This fundamental question will be raised by Phil Goodwin, Emeritus Professor of Transport Policy, Centre for Transport & Society, University of the West of England. Models tend to extrapolate from the past, and to assume that the future will be similar. Yet the accelerating pace of change clearly shows that the future may be

The future is a foreign country: we will do things very differently there. The challenge for movement and place professionals is to help make viable plans today for an uncertain tomorrow. Movement, living, working and leisure patterns are morphing faster than ever before on the back of rapid technological advances and social change. How can we model today for post-peak car, digitally-savvy generations whose behaviour patterns evolve as rapidly as new technology? Yet innovators in the ever-expa

It is something significant when the top man at Ford Motor Company outlines a ‘Blueprint for Mobility’, which calls for the automotive, telecommunications and passenger transport industries to collaborate to address a coming personal mobility crisis During his keynote address at the 2012 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ford executive chairman Bill Ford outlined a plan for a ‘joined up mobility’ solution that will help avoid a potential future of what he called &ldquo

Well done LTT in pulling together the publicly quoted costs of road congestion to the economy, ranging from the Prime Minister’s £7bn a year to £30bn (In Passing, 30 Mar). They can’t all be right. Indeed, are any right? I am struck by the evidence that the efficient road hauliers, for instance those that deliver for the supermarket chains, can meet very demanding contractual terms including penalties for delivering outside a specified 30 minute time slot. I had the oppor

Keith Buchan’s letter is certainly timeous, in highlighting the statistical, and demographic pointers that are already making the volume of car use stabilise/decline in a way that seems more than just a temporary dip (Letters LTT 29 Mar). I’d comment as one who goes out and observes, some clear and tangible indications that car use and quite possibly car ownership are set to go downwards. I haven’t owned a car long-term since 1976, apart from a short period of having inherite

After the Prime Minister’s speech last month calling for more private sector road investment in England’s roads, LTT can exclusively reveal that the M25 is to be sold to the French. How do we know? Well, while doing a bit of research on the Highways Agency’s ‘managed motorway’ programme, we stumbled across this map on the HA’s website. The village names sound English enough but check out the motorway, or rather, the ‘Autorroute britannique M25’! No

Keith Buchan, chair of the Transport Planning Society, last month wrote that the Department for Transport’s traffic forecasts were “now so far from reality that there must be an urgent review” of the National Transport Model (Letters LTT 30 Mar). As with all such reviews, the outcome depends on the thoroughness, independence, excellence and credibility of the technical work. The suggestion is given added salience by David Cameron’s speech at the Institution of Civil Engi

ROAD TRAFFIC volumes in England are likely to grow by almost 50% over the next 25 years, according to the DfT’s new National Road Traffic Forecasts (NRTF). The headline forecast is that road traffic will rise from 261.2bn vehicle miles in 20101 to 375.6bn in 2035. This 44% growth is a central estimate, between the low growth of 34% (to 349.8bn miles) and the high growth of 55% (to 405bn miles). NRTF used to cover Great Britain but in an age of devolved administrations the forecasts cover

Dutch surveying company Geomaat has introduced a new mobile laser mapping system, StreetMapper, into the UK. StreetMapper has been specifically designed for the rapid 3D mapping of highways, runways, railways, infrastructure and buildings. Using vehicle-mounted lasers offering a 360-degree field of view, StreetMapper enables high-precision mapping to a range of 300 metres, a capacity of 550,000 measurements per second per sensor and recorded accuracies of better than 10 millimetres. The company

Network Rail has collaborated with Google to add some of the UK’s biggest railway stations to the internet search engine’s Google Street View application. This will, Network Rail says, enable users to better find their way around some of Britain’s busiest transport hubs by, for example, checking the layout of the station they are visiting and finding out what facilities and shops there are before they set off on their journey. So far Google Street View has surveyed 13 stations

Car maker Ford is set to introduce its SYNC in-car connectivity system to European customers at the Geneva Motor Show in early March as part of its launch of the new B-Max vehicle. The SYNC system allows drivers to connect their mobile phones and music players into the car’s systems (so that, for example, drivers can have incoming text messages read to them by the car) and also includes an emergency assistance function, where the emergency services are automatically notified by the car if

Prime Minister David Cameron last week hosted a conference at which the ‘Copenhagen wheel’ was demonstrated. This innovative device, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA, can be fitted to the back wheel of a bicycle and stores energy when the cyclist is in motion, or braking, and releases it in the form of electricity when the cyclist is, for example, riding up a hill and needs a little mechanical help. It can also, its designers say, be connected to a sm

Chris du Sautoy has joined SKM Colin Buchanan as technical director for pedestrian modelling. He was previously with MVA Consultancy, where he was director-interchanges, and has more than 20 years of experience in transport, with particular expertise in pedestrian movement and modelling of stations, interchanges and sports stadia (including London 2012 Olympic venues).

The Automobile Association has launched its first technology-based insurance product, AA Drivesafe, which uses telematics to track a driver’s performance and adjust insurance premiums accordingly. “It is likely to appeal most to those who currently pay very high premiums, for example young and inexperienced drivers,” the AA says. AA Drivesafe tracks driving behaviour using a small electronic ‘drivesafe box’ installed in a vehicle that measures speed, the types of r

The future of Intelligent Transport Systems is co-operation, Alan Bristow, director of traffic at Transport for London, told the conference, envisaging a future where individual road vehicles and the transport infrastructure can ‘talk’ to each other to maximise the efficiency of movement on an often congested network. TfL, working with car manufacturer BMW, has already begun tests to make this vision a reality, Bristow added, “and this is definitely where things are going, and

First Glasgow, the Scottish city’s biggest bus operator, is now displaying QR (quick response) codes at bus stops across Greater Glasgow to help customers access its website when on the move. Customers can now scan a QR code at bus stops and visit a mobile version of the www.firstgroup.com/ukbuswebsite on any supported phone; they can then learn more about bus service updates, timetables, news and initiatives. The QR code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white ba

The DfT has announced that it is to provide £2.7m of funding to 27 English police forces to enable them to buy 37 3D laser scanners to collect data on road traffic accidents. The equipment, which is being supplied by Nottingham-based firm 3D Laser Mapping, will, the company says, enable the police to collect highly detailed, 3D images of crash sites up to 50 per cent faster than traditional survey techniques. Data from the scanners is used to produce high quality graphics and detailed pla

If you are a local authority or other body looking to promote cycling, how do you go about it? What exactly do you do? Well, one obvious thing to try is make an effort to provide potential cyclists with good quality information on where they can cycle safely. Or, in other words, give them a cycling map. Which is where Martin Whitfield, founder of CycleCity Guides, comes in – he has spent the past 15 years systematically mapping cycle routes in England (and parts of Wales) and, in so doing

A plan to use GPS devices to compile the National Travel Survey looks set to be dropped after a trial of the technology produced hugely different results from the traditional diary-based data. The DfT had seen GPS as a possible way of reducing the burden on respondents, reducing costs, improving data quality and modernising survey methods. It also believed that the devices could provide more accurate information and a much richer picture of active travel behaviour (walking, running and cycling)

Manchester City Council has launched a Twitter feed to keep people up to date on where its gritters are working during the winter. The feed – @MCCGritters1 – will let followers know when salt is being spread on key routes. Surrey County Council, meanwhile, has also launched a gritting-related Twitter feed in partnership with BBC Surrey. The feed – @surreytravel – will also provide residents with updates on roadworks, road closures and traffic information. Surrey has also

P resident Nicolas Sarkozy committed France to produce a roadmap for the deployment of Intelligent Speed Adaptation systems within the next three months during a speech on road safety matters on November 30. “Enforcing speed limits must remain our top priority,” he said, suggesting that the ISA system that the French government has been testing since 2001, known as LAVIA, would enable the country “to achieve outstanding results”. “France must be a forerunner in this

A new online mapping service (http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-uk) showing the scale of fatalities and injuries from collisions on Britain’s roads has been launched by transport mapping specialists ITO World. The free service allows users to see the location where deaths and injuries have taken place on Britain’s roads between 2000 and 2010, pinpointed to the nearest few metres. As well as the mode of transport (pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist, vehicle occupant), the site gi

Transport modelling software developer Transport Simulation Systems (TSS) has released the seventh version of its Aimsun program. The main new feature of the latest version of Aimsun is, TSS says, the inclusion of a hybrid simulator, a tool that allows users to model very large-scale networks mesoscopically whilst also giving them the option of zooming in microscopically on any areas that require greater granularity.  

The information and data revolution now sweeping across the passenger transport sector is set to have some radical consequences for both the customers and those who supply and manage the different modal choices. The picture is still emerging, but some major players from outside the traditional world of operators and local authority co-ordinators are setting out their stalls, and an opportunity to hear their thinking will be provided at the forthcoming Travel 2020 conference on 2/3 Nov. In parti

German transport modelling software supplier PTV has launched a new product, VISWALK, for the microsimulation modelling of pedestrian movements. “One of the special features of VISWALK is dynamic routing,” explains Tobias Kretz, a product manager at PTV. “Pedestrians, just like vehicle drivers, usually try to arrive at their destination as quickly as possible. Often the quickest route is very similar to the shortest route. However, there are situations where this rule does not