The 13th Asia Pacific ITS Forum and Exhibition is to be hosted by Auckland this year – the first time an international ITS conference has been held in this country – and Resolve Group’s Managing Director, Martin Leak, is one of the board members.

Auckland is the 3rd most congested city in Australasia and meeting the challenges of population growth over the next 30 years will involve the continued integration of Auckland transport networks into a single system. This challenge underlies the theme for the 2014 Forum – SCORE, or ‘safety, choices, opportunities, results, efficiencies’.

Every ITS conference provides excellent opportunities for delegates to share knowledge and challenges, exchange information and advance applications and strategies, and this year should prove no different. There is an exciting line up of international speakers, including Hiroyuki Watanabe, Chairman of ITS Japan and Technical Executive of the Toyota Motor Corporation; Paul Rose, Technical Director of Highways ITS Consulting (UK) and Chew Hock Yong, CEO of Singapore’s Land Transport Authority.

Delegates will have the opportunity to visit Auckland’s Joint Traffic Operations Centre at Smales Farm, the Northern Busway, the Britomart Public Transport Control Centre, the AMETI Multi-Modal Project and the Tunnel Management System at the Victoria Park Tunnel, Waterview Tunnel and the Alpurt Toll Tunnel. You can register for the conference here.

Environmental sustainability, cycling, safety and social factors are becoming ever more important considerations in the development of new projects around NZ, as is the improved efficiency of freight logistics. These and other industry trends were explored in the recent Transportation Group Conference attended by Steve Griffith and Sharon Wilder.

Steve also noted increased coverage on how the transport needs of the future are becoming integrated with the ways in which we share and access information to work and play, especially in areas such as autonomous vehicles and V2X (vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure) development.

The event also marked the 100th anniversary of engineering in New Zealand. Comparisons were made with past engineering ”revolutions” to suggest that this recent move towards the integration of information technology might signal a significant paradigm shift.

How far has this technology come? The video below shows BMW’s new Self-Driving 330i smash Stig’s record round the Top Gear track. It’s pretty impressive.