Martin Leak recently attended the Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress. He is personally very interested and excited by the direction ITS is taking and the leaps it has made in the last few years.

The theme of this year’s Congress was, ‘Reinventing transportation in our connected world,’ and the conference supported the theme by having a wide range of technologies on display including connected and autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, robotics, sensor technology, and real-time weather and road conditions data analysis.

Appropriately, many sessions focussed on the challenges of adopting ITS, such as technical, human and legislative factors, and the need for accurate and complex data sharing. Its application for freight and public transportation was also examined, as well as safety issues, sustainability and traffic management.

The conference made clear that we are on the cusp of a transformation, where technology offers realistic solutions to our global mobility, safety, and environmental challenges. However, technologies alone won’t bring about solutions. We need to take an integrated approach, combining state of the art technologies with social innovations. We need coordinated interaction between people and technologies, bringing synergy between modes of transport to offer mobility in a way that is environmentally friendly, safe and efficient. It’s an exciting time to be in the industry, but a time of great responsibility also, as we put in place the fundamental methodologies and infrastructure from which these technologies will be deployed.

A ride-and-drive experience that demonstrated V2X technology.

Resolve Group’s National Manager for Water, Thomas Haarhoff, attended Water New Zealand’s annual conference in Hamilton from 17-19 September, which looked at implementing reform in the water sector.

Thomas noted two recurring themes at the conference: how asset criticality needs to drive asset management decisions, and the growing importance of measuring inflow and infiltration sewer networks.  It is hoped the techniques related to the analysis of criticality can guide renewal programmes, helping to defer non-critical renewals and thereby mitigating the ‘renewals bow wave.’ The accurate measurement of inflow and infiltration enhances the criticality approach by defining when assets that would be run to failure would become a cost and compliance burden for an asset owner.

The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT) and Christchurch City are taking the criticality approach further, integrating the cost of earthquake recovery into asset design decisions. This provides an interesting tool for decision makers to minimise the cost of future earthquakes. The work could have applications throughout New Zealand and be applied to any natural hazard.