Home » Traffic management
Date published
1st April 2019
AGD are exhibiting at Traffex on stand D026.
Traffex 2019 is the UK’s largest and most established event for all those involved in the highways sector. Thousands of traffic engineers, safety professionals and infrastructure planners are heading to Birmingham’s NEC to explore the latest products, tech advances and services from some 350 leading exhibitors. Register for your free ticket now.
Features for 2019
- New conceptual Road Feature working with leading consultants to take visitors on an interactive journey while showcasing some of the latest products, concepts and services
- A ‘Trading floor’ area for exhibitors to deliver information on business deals and new products and innovation
- Four conference theatres delivering the latest strategic high-level thinking and best practice operation delivery via case studies, technical session and debate and discussion and covering every sector of the highways and transport sector
- Live hackathon – the Data Discovery Centre – using real industry data to help create solutions for challenges on the network
- Directors’ Briefings – a series of briefings for local authority and private sector directors to help them develop and deliver more efficient and effective services and create better places to live and work
- Round Table Debates – a series of invite-only round table debates reflecting the latest thinking
- TRAFFEX Community – Networking at Traffex isn’t just for the day. Discover all the additional networking opportunities available throughout the event – The Traffex Dinner, Exhibitors’ Drinks Reception and Traffex partner bars around Birmingham
- Co-located with Parkex, Europe’s leading parking trade event, the two shows are essential visiting for anyone working within the transport engineering sector.
Home » Traffic management
The UK government has announced new funding for a platform that will enable app developers to make use of location information about buses in order to improve public transportation services, particularly in rural areas.
The UK’s Buses Minister, Nusrat Ghani, has announced £4m (US$5.2m) of funding for a platform that will provide real-time location information about services, giving greater certainty to passengers about when their bus will arrive.
The platform enables app developers to use information from GPS trackers, which are already fitted to 97% of UK buses. This will provide a service that is already available in some major towns and cities, and will give people in other areas across the country, including rural and remote areas, the ability to plan journeys more easily.
Research shows that one of the barriers to young people using buses is not having information readily available on their smartphones, but with fares and times at their fingertips, this will cut the uncertainty out of bus travel.
The drive toward improved and open data for bus services across England is the first step in cutting the barriers to introducing Mobility as a Service (MaaS), one-stop-ticketing products and applications, in a bid to increase usage. On-demand bus travel is already available in Liverpool, run by ArrivaClick. Routes are not fixed, but are determined by where passengers want to go within a corridor; in Liverpool, six luxury 15-seat buses take people in an area between the city center and John Lennon Airport. These services are driven by high quality data and computer-based algorithms.
The funding for the new platform builds on the government’s recently published ‘Future of mobility urban strategy’, which looks at how people will use transportation in the future and how new technology can make journeys better. The government is also investing in ways to speed up bus journeys. As part of the first tranche of the £2.5bn (US$3.2bn) Transforming Cities Fund, Derby and Nottingham, the North East, Portsmouth and Southampton will see the deployment of bus priority traffic lights to speed up trips to the city centers.
The transit priority systems (TPS) aim to help unlock productivity and help the economies in these areas to thrive. The new bus open data regulations are being implemented as part of the Bus Services Act, which gives local authorities additional powers to partner with bus operators and shape services in their areas to deliver improvements to passengers.
“People expect to turn up to a bus stop knowing when their next service will arrive, particularly in rural areas,” explained Ghani. “We’re investing in systems to make it easier for people to find out where their bus is, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. This will save the time people waste waiting, give more people certainty over services and help increase passenger numbers. It could help revolutionize bus travel and move us one step closer to Mobility as a Service and on-demand public transport systems.”
