News

Utility companies who take too long to complete their road works in the UK will face higher charges, transport minister Norman Baker has announced. All utility companies who dig up the road must agree a time frame for their works with the local council.

Clearview Traffic Group has announced the 150th installation of the Golden River M100 wireless vehicle detection system within the UK. This milestone also marks an installed base of over 1,500 M100 sensors and 300 M110 Access Points in the two years since its launch.

Urgent repairs will continue on the Forth Road Bridge in east central Scotland this weekend after work the previous weekend was disrupted by strong winds. The bridge authority has also confirmed that a further three weekends of traffic restrictions will be required over the following weeks. On Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 March traffic will be restricted to a single lane in each direction from 3am until 12noon.

The organisers of the 2012 World of Asphalt/World of Aggregates event in Charlotte North Carolina claim records have been broken for this year’s exhibition and conference. The event is run by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, AEM.

The authorities in Romania are launching the tender process for a new highway section. The country’s national roads and highways company, CNADNR, is handling the tenders for the project, which involves designing and building a 9km section of the Transilvania Highway between Gilau and Nadaselu in Cluj county.

Navtech Radar will be showcasing the safety and economic benefits of using longer-range radar systems for Automated Incident Detection (AID) and enforcement at Intertraffic 2012. The company’s ClearWay sensor technology is currently deployed in live tunnel and above-ground environments in Northern Europe and has been further developed to provide count and classification capabilities as well as an effective counter to illegal tailgating and unsafe lane-change manoeuvres.

Serbian contractor Milos Trans will start work on the Serbia’s Corridor 11 highway during 2012. The firm will carry out work on the stretch running from Preljina to Takovo.

Mitsubishi Electric Visual Solutions America has announced it is shipping three new widescreen DLP cubes in its popular Seventy Series line of video wall products. These displays incorporate Mitsubishi’s most advanced technologies, providing innovative automated features that boost image quality and colour balance, extend the life of the LED engine under certain operating conditions, and improve overall usability.

Chinese construction equipment firm Sany is buying Putzmeister, the German manufacturer of concrete pumps. The terms of the deal have not been revealed officially but the acquisition is said to be worth €360-500 million according to various reports.

A leading American manufacturing association figure claims Congress approval of the highway bill would create a “much-needed growth engine” for US jobs, infrastructure, and national and global domestic company trade.

The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, TNO, is in the process of developing a low cost cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) technology. This is being demonstrated in a test fleet of Toyota Prius cars in which factory-fitted long-range radar is used together with wireless vehicle to vehicle communications (802.11p and ETSI Geonet) and GPS based location, to enable CACC.

An English borough council has invested more than £500,000 in a new fleet of state-of-the-art GPS guided gritting trucks to help combat the big winter chill descending on Britain.

Brazilian group Bertin is forming a partnership with Italian company Atlantia to merge the management of road concessions they both own in Brazil.