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May/June 2026 | www.itsinternational.com

International

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY FOR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT AND URBAN MOBILITY

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MOVE!

Game plan How ITS software gets people to and from big events Also… Lidar lights up Honky Tonk Highway Google’s Kristin White: ‘We are literally saving lives!’ Why BABA is changing everything

For the latest on ITS America 2026 go to www.itsamericalive.com

North AmericaEdition

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Modeling and Planning

Prediction and Management

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CONTENTS

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Contents

May/June 2026

05 COMMENT

36 AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES The City of Tampere has launched Finland’s first commercially-operated automated shuttle service

06 NEWS DIGEST 08 CONTRACTS & DEALS

41 VISION TECHNOLOGY 10 INTERVIEW

A vision-language platform turns existing CCTV into a continuous incident sensor: Tollscopic explains why agencies are paying attention

Google Public Sector’s Kristin White: “We are just at the tip of the spear with changing lives with these technologies”

15 SOFTWARE

44 MASS TRANSIT

Kick off! How can simulation help us understand the reality of moving huge crowds efficiently and safely to multiple venues in narrow time windows?

And then comes the night: Mehri Mohebbi explains why nighttime mobility is a critical ITS test

47 AI IN TRANSPORTATION 20 BUILD AMERICA, BUY

AMERICA “This is your entry ticket to the most significant infrastructure funding cycle in a generation,” explains John E. Shearer of Hi-Tek Electronics

Nashville, the country music capital of the world, has started playing a different tune by utilising Lidar to improve road safety in its dense urban environment

49 PRODUCTS & INNOVATIONS

29 V2X DEPLOYMENT Arizona has one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the US: Maricopa County DoT wants to see what V2X tech can do about that

North AmericaEdition North America area only

32 AV HORIZONS The story of AV development is a tale of two cities – or at least two types of city, says Beate Kubitz

34 ENFORCEMENT

NA 01 Companies including Ettifos,

Cohda Wireless, Sensys Networks and Swarco McCain explain why BABA compliance is now mission-critical

East Africa’s increasing urbanisation means there are more cars on the region’s roads: but where will they all park and how will they pay? May/June 2026 | www.itsinternational.com

International

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY FOR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT AND URBAN MOBILITY

TOGETH

WE MOVER E!

NA 08 Intersections need the safety

Cover story Can you kick it? Image: © Alphaspirit | Dreamstime.com

47 Follow us on LinkedIn

Game plan How ITS software gets people to and from big events Also… Lidar lights up Honky Tonk Highway Google’s Kristin White: ‘We are literally saving lives!’ Why BABA is changing everything

For the latest on ITS America 2026 go to www.itsamericalive.com

@ITS International Magazine

North AmericaEdition

layer which the aviation industry introduced to its operations decades ago, thinks Derq’s Georges Aoude

Next-gen Smart AI Laser 360° MOBILITY SOLUTIONS Trigger Vehicle classiﬁcation Vehicle volume measurement MAIN FEATURES On-board AI Classiﬁcation Fog immunity technology Based on Stark Platform

www.tattile.com

art: donaldecompany.com m

COMARK+ LASER

COMMENT

GETTING FANS SAFELY ‘FROM SOFA TO SEAT’ IS A BIG WIN FOR ITS

“

There will be plenty of ITS stars off the pitch in this World Cup

“

predict is actually going to happen)? Several modes need to be brought together in a narrow time window. How will drivers behave when they interact with crowds on walkways around a stadium or concert hall? Also, how are people themselves going to behave once they’re at the venue itself, maybe queueing at turnstiles or waiting in line for hotdogs? Does crowd behaviour change in different countries or for different events? How do you stop metro station platforms getting too crowded? And

Editor Adam Hill adam.hill@primeglobalpublishing.com

Chief Operating Officer Andrew Barriball andrewb@primeglobalpublishing.com

Sales Director Dan Emmerson dane@primeglobalpublishing.com

Publisher Paul Hayes paul.hayes@primeglobalpublishing.com

Head of Digital Sarah Biswell sarah.biswell@primeglobalpublishing.com

CEO Christine Clancy

Staff Writer David Arminas david.arminas@primeglobalpublishing.com

t won’t have passed you by, but the Fifa World Cup is upon us – 48 teams, 16 stadiums, 104 matches, hundreds of thousands of fans – across three countries. When it comes to transportation, these are massive, multi-venue, multimodal challenges. ITS International was delighted to partner with PTV Group for a webinar looking at how simulation can help authorities understand the nuts and bolts of getting fans to and from venues efficiently and – crucially – safely for big sporting and entertainment events. (PTV calls this ‘from sofa to seat’, which has a pleasing ring to it). Mass transit, as its name suggests, is an obvious way to move huge numbers of people, and there has been justifiable controversy over price hikes for journeys to and from New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium during the World Cup. At the time of writing, bus fares look to have been cut to something more reasonable following a backlash, but train ticket prices are still high – not that driving and parking is a cheap option either. Anyway, leaving pricing aside, how do we move from intuition (how we think things might be when you get lots of people together in the same place) to data-driven decision-making (what we

Chairman John Murphy

Design Team Simon Ward, Andy Taylder

For the latest on ITS America 2026 go to www.itsamericalive.com

why on earth can’t people just all stagger their journeys to arrive in the most efficient way possible (answer: because we’re all human beings and it doesn’t work like that). Of course, software simulation has a valuable place in ensuring optimal transport systems more generally. After all, traffic engineers and transportation authorities spend their working lives immersed in high-stakes environments. And while what happens on the ball in the US, Canada and Mexico in June and July will take the headlines, there will be plenty of ITS stars off the pitch in this World Cup. By the way, the ITS International team will be in Detroit when the tournament starts, producing three Daily News magazines at the ITS America 2026 Conference & Expo. We can’t wait for kick off! See you there... Adam Hill EDITOR

Have your say Email me at adam.hill@primeglobalpublishing.com

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ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

NEWS DIGEST

Umovity & Tatweer ramp up in Abu Dhabi

India opens first MLFF tolling system National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has launched the country's first multi-lane free-flow (MLFF) tolling system. Around 41,500 vehicles crossed the MLFF toll location, at the Chorayasi toll plaza on the Surat–Bharuch section of National Highway 48 (NH-48) in Gujarat, on the first day. NH-48 runs 2,807km (1,744 miles)

Umovity (the ITS brand which encompasses Econolite and PTV Group) and Tatweer have deployed what they say is the first adaptive ramp metering system in the Middle East. Installed in United Arab Emirates, on Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Street, the system uses real-time data to regulate traffic entering the highway. The solution combines Econolite’s EOS software for real-time local control with ST Engineering’s advanced traffic management through its TransCore (TransSuite) platform for ramp metering coordination and monitoring. Tatweer led local engineering, system integration, and deployment, coordinating with Abu Dhabi’s Integrated Transport Centre.

from Delhi in the north to Chennai on the southeast coast. The MLFF system uses ANPR and FASTag-based electronic toll collection. Part of India's Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, NHAI manages around 70,000km of highways and is responsible for toll collection on about 45,000 km of them.

ITS World Congress 2026: early-bird registration

Texas real-time warning pilot looks ahead

A pilot project has received around $1.75 million funding from the US Department of Transportation to address pedestrian fatalities. The initiative, led by researchers from the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering at Texas Tech University, hopes to provide real-time warnings to road users. The team will evaluate a real-time warning and datacollection system that uses Lidar to address ‘pedestrian-involved’ and failure-to-yield crashes. The Lidar devices will be installed at crosswalks between intersections and integrated with existing stop signs at select highrisk intersections. The system will use algorithms designed for processing point cloud data on-site.

Early-bird registration for ITS World Congress 2026 in Gangneung, Republic of Korea, has opened. Visitors to the event can go to www.2026itsworldcongress. org for details of discounts, which last until 30 June. The event runs from 19-23 October this year at the Gangneung Olympic Park, which hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics. This year's theme is “Beyond Mobility, Connected World”, and the Congress will bring together global leaders, ITS manufacturers, industry experts, and researchers. ITS International is proud to be producing three editions of the Daily News at the Congress.

A traﬃc monitoring solution in the Latvian capital, Riga, has cut red-light violations by 66%, according to LMT Group. The system was rolled out just over a year ago by LMT in nine locations. The peak of violations was 3,636 in August 2025, with that number declining steadily through autumn and winter to 1,134 in February this year. Riga Municipal Police manually issued 1,250 red-light violation tickets across the entire city in 2024. Data shows that the worst hour for red-light violations is between 4pm and 5pm - twice the number than during the morning commute.

Pirelli and Univrses agree rolling data deal

LMT cuts red-light violations in Riga

Univrses is to integrate its 3DAI technologies into Pirelli’s Cyber Tyre system solutions. Pirelli says Cyber Tyre is the world’s ﬁrst integrated hardware and software system capable of collecting data from sensors inside the tyre itself. The system processes the information using Pirelli’s proprietary software and algorithms and communicates in real time with the vehicle’s electronics and with the cloud.

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NEWS DIGEST

Cavnue has been selected to deliver a corridor modernisation project on Interstate 95 for the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDoT). Cavnue, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Consor Engineers, will use its Smart Road Platform on an eight-mile section of the north-south corridor in the Richmond area of the US state. The company will be responsible for deployment, operations and maintenance of its network of pole-mounted cameras, sensors, and wireless communication infrastructure. This is designed to provide continuous, overlapping coverage of road conditions across lanes and shoulders, delivering data directly to VDoT's traﬃc operations centre.

UITP shortlists three cities for Summit 2029

Three cities have been earmarked as possible hosts for the UITP Summit in 2029. Budapest (Hungary), Lisbon (Portugal) and Oslo (Norway) are all in the running, with bids led by their respective public transport agencies: Budapesti Közlekedési Központ (BKK), Carris and Ruter. Meanwhile, Hong Kong has been conﬁrmed as the host in 2028, beating its fellow Chinese city Guangzhou, as well as Vancouver, Canada.

ITS America 2026: Cybersecurity & Data Zone debut

India launches V2X consultation The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a consultation document on Vehicle to Everything (V2X) technology in the country. The paper on the Regulatory Framework for V2X Communication outlines road safety challenges in India, citing "high accident rates, poor lane discipline and a mix of motorised and non-motorised traﬃc", and explains how technology can help prevent collisions. It leans towards adopting the 3GPP C-V2X radio along with the ETSI ITS stack, which it says "is emerging as the most suitable choice for India due to its scalability, communication modes and alignment with future 5G networks".

ITS America Conference & Expo 2026, which runs from 9-12 June in Detroit, Michigan, will feature a Cybersecurity & Data Zone for the ﬁrst time. The dedicated space brings together more than 30 exhibitors and industry experts looking at increasingly urgent questions such as connected vehicle security, data management and smart infrastructure protection. "Cybersecurity is a fundamental requirement for the safe deployment of intelligent transportation technologies that connect our vehicles, infrastructure, and data systems," says Laura Chace, president and CEO of ITS America. Go to www. itsamericaevents.com to register.

Leaders urged to attend UN road safety meeting The International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) is urging heads of state and governments to participate in the upcoming United Nations HighLevel Meeting on Road Safety. The event at UN HQ in New York City from 20-21 July marks the midpoint of the Decade of Action for Road Safety, which targeted a 50% reduction in deaths and injuries by 2030. The iRAP letter encourages national leaders to support the Kyrgyz Republic and Slovak Republic permanent missions to the UN in preparing “a bold and decisive statement to save lives and prevent injuries”.

Cavnue wins VDoT traﬃc ops contract

Prime Creative Media acquires ITS International Prime Creative Media, through its international subsidiary Prime Global Publishing, has acquired ITS International and its sister publication Global Highways from Route One Publishing. Prime CEO Christine Clancy said: “By investing in these titles, we’re reinforcing our commitment to delivering value to readers, partners and stakeholders across the infrastructure

ecosystem.” Andrew Barriball, publisher of ITS International and Prime Global Publishing’s chief operating oﬃcer – international, adds: “Importantly, this move brings continuity for our audiences and partners, with our experienced team making the transition and remaining dedicated to delivering the high-quality content and insights the market expects.”

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$13m WiM deals for Quarterhill in Indiana

Init wins Sydney ticketing contract

ST Engineering has bagged ITS and parking contracts worth more than $100m in the Middle East. The Singapore-based company's Urban Solutions business has begun a three-year deal as the Egis QBC joint venture’s preferred partner to support Qatar’s national intelligent transport system, providing maintenance for the Road Management Centre of Ashghal, Qatar’s Public Works Authority. Meanwhile in Jordan, the ﬁrm plans to deploy its GoParkin smart car park system at the King Hussein Business Park later this year: the solution integrates ANPR, electric vehicle charging and multimodal payment capabilities on a single platform.

Sensys Gatso heightens enforcement in Sweden Sensys Gatso Group is to install its first gantry-mounted automated traffic control (ATK) cameras for Swedish transport administration Trafikverket on three high-traffic roads. The three new gantry-mount locations are on Route 27 in Kärda, outside Värnamo; the Stallbacka Bridge in Trollhättan; and Route 21 at Vanneberga. "By placing the camera on a gantry above the road, we can now monitor more lanes simultaneously," says Erik Hemgren, key account manager at Sensys Gatso Sweden. The gantry mount provides a much wider view of traffic than roadside units, the firm adds.

Transport for NSW has given Init the contract to introduce account-based ticketing (ABT) as part of its upgrade of metro Sydney's Opal public transport payment system. Opal Next Generation (ONG), an Aus$820 million (US$588m) improvement, is expected to be complete in 2029. Trapeze Group Asia Paciﬁc has been awarded the bus solution contract. Apart from the new ABT system, ONG will include upgrading and replacing around 25,000 readers across trains, light rail, ferries, metro and 5,000 buses, as well as introducing new communications and 5G capability for buses. The system serves almost two million daily passengers.

Indiana Department of Transportation (INDoT) has signed Weigh in Motion (WiM) deals worth $13m with Quarterhill. The two new quantity purchase awards build on existing work to maintain and enhance INDoT's WiM and virtual WiM (VWiM) systems. The agreements run to 30 April, 2030, and will see Quarterhill supplying equipment, software, installation, maintenance, calibration, and system repairs for WiM and VWiM locations statewide. This will include ongoing support for previouslydeployed systems alongside new installations, allowing INDoT to expand its commercial vehicle data and screening programmes.

CONTR ACT & DE AL S

Kapsch wins tolling deals in Australia & US IBTTA and the 5G Automotive Association have signed a Memorandum of Understanding around cooperation on tolling. The two associations say they will collaborate in areas where their interests intersect, including technical, testing and deployment activities - and ensure that tolling and road management companies have a voice in the development of connected vehicle technologies. The agreement, which includes Vehicle to Everything (V2X)-enabled tolling use cases, was formalised at the IBTTA Technology Summit in Orlando, Florida. 5GAA's members include such major global players as Volkswagen, Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple, Ford and Indra.

Kapsch TrafficCom has been awarded separate tolling system contracts to upgrade multi-lane free-flow on the EastLink tollway in Melbourne, Australia; and to expand the SB Express Lanes network in California’s San Bernardino County, US. Melbourne’s 39km EastLink tollway connects the Eastern, Monash, Frankston and Peninsula Link Freeways. Kapsch will design, supply, install and commission the upgrade, scheduled for completion in mid-2028. Meanwhile, in California, the firm is to expand the SB Express Lanes network for San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, relocating and integrating tolling equipment owned by the Riverside County Transportation Commission.

IBTTA and 5GAA sign V2X toll agreement

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Getting closer to Vision Zero Protecting and Serving Generations Every 24 seconds, a life is lost on the road. Families and friends are devastated. Let’s change it with e.g. detection of: – Speed and red light violations – Seat belt violations and mobile phone use – Illegal driving maneuvers We will get you closer to Vision Zero. Get in touch with us now!

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INTERVIEW

“WE ARE LITERALLY SAVING LIVES!” Google it! Kristin White of Google Public Sector shares her views with Adam Hill on empathy, workzone safety and public-private partnerships, among many other things…

ost people don’t immediately think of Google when they think of transportation. Kristin White thinks they are missing something. Google Public Sector’s head of transportation strategy and partnerships is on a mission to bring the data giant’s massive resources to the task of solving some of transport’s trickiest problems. “Private sector can move faster than government in ways I couldn’t imagine,” she admits. “And sometimes in government, we’ve had situations where we forget our values or our mission, or we’re just so stuck in the ways of the past that we’re not trying to innovate forward. I was pleasantly astonished that, at Google, at least we try and walk the walk, right? We’re trying to live our values every day. And it’s more refreshing than I thought it would be, Adam - but I still miss public sector and public service so much.” White has extensive public sector experience, including as chief operating officer of ITS America and as acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Google Public Sector came into being five years ago, White explains. “It was founded with the idea that we should be harnessing the power of Google to serve government and [the] public sector.” Transportation joined verticals such as healthcare and education and, a couple of years ago, the company approached White. “They said: ‘With the advent of more funding at the [US] federal level for transportation and, of course, with Google’s technologies like Google Maps and Waymo, we would like to invest more in the gaps in transportation. And so they asked me to come on board to develop a transportation strategy for AI and technology.” In addition to bringing her public sector insight into the fourth-biggest company in the world, White is also now a ‘field strategist’, trying to take that strategy into Google’s field offices in ‘nearly all 50’ US states. “And so the idea is now that we have a strategy to innovate and use all of Google’s technologies - whether it’s our search or cloud or AI technologies - for good; we should be doing that in transportation challenges,” she says. “The private sector doesn’t have the expertise that we have in ITS and transportation. We’re infusing that subject-matter expertise to really refine

the problem statement and get the heart of the problem so that we can use technologies like AI to, for example, predict where crashes are going to happen and prevent them from happening.” Problem-solving White’s experience must make her unusual at Google – or at least might mean that her problem-solving arc takes a different shape to her Silicon Valley peers. She smiles: “The world of transportation technology takes a systems approach, and it’s really hard to understand the system - whether you’re in the UK and Europe, or North America and the US - understanding all the disparate systems at the national level, the state or road authority level, the local level. Then how you tie all that in a non-profit like ITS America, or at the government level of the US Department of Transportation, is really key. And I’m one of the few people - there’s a few of us nationally, we have a tiny little cohort - that have been in all of these roles: local, state, federal, national non-profit; and frankly, it’s pairing all of the knowledge that we’ve gleaned from each of those roles to tie it into a systems approach. Because this is such a public sector mission: we all benefit when we all benefit.” www.itsinternational.com - get your intelligent mobility fix

INTERVIEW

Advocating for the importance of empathy and equity have been golden threads which have run through White’s time in transportation. She is convinced that these are values which Google embraces. “What we’re trying to do, is serve as many people as we can without anyone being left behind,” she insists. “That’s actually the vision of Google for transportation. Whatever anyone thinks, what I really admired about the work of Google is two things. Even in the government, saying the word ‘empathy’, people were like: ‘why are we talking about empathy? I’m trying to build a transportation system’. At FHWA, we started to fuse it as two ideas: one of psychological safety, which is a concept that actually was formed at Google when they were trying to understand why are Google teams so high-performing; and psychological safety, this idea that you have the ability to bring new ideas to the table without criticism. You can flag an issue if you see it, without critique. You can ask for ideas, and really build a collaborative team. And that is research that Google started about 15 years ago, and so that’s just part and parcel of what we do here.” Human-centred design White says there is a second idea of empathy that she sees daily at work. “Google is an engineering company, a tech company, and part of that requires human-centred design,” she says. “And the first step to human-centred design is empathetic inquiry. That means empathising with the customer, whether that’s New York MTA - the largest system in the country, and trying to understand how they want to keep their maintenance staff safe and keep the trains running - or whether it’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, and we’re trying to make sure all traffic signals are enhanced so that they can seamlessly operate through the system. That takes true empathy and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. And so it’s actually funny: it was a newer concept to most folks I’ve worked with in government - but here at Google and Google Public Sector, folks were like: ‘Oh yeah, we’ve been taught about that for a long time’.”

‘National epidemic’ “The first is safety, because we still have a national epidemic and people dying on our road system,” White says. “The second is resiliency, because we need to have secure systems, cyber-resilient systems, systems that can withstand any type of weather event, whether it’s planned or not. The third is operational efficiency: 50% of the time we’re building out a system, but then the other 50% of the time we’re maintaining it and keeping it safe and making sure it’s still running. And so there’s a lot of tools, like

“

Google has vast resources and White is vocal about using some of that for public good. “I get asked a lot about that,” she says. “So what we’ve been doing this year at Google Public Sector is going out to states and localities, to their executive leadership or their teams, and talking about the trends we’re seeing in public sector innovation in this space, with AI in particular. I’m getting asked a lot about artificial intelligence and our cloud solutions that are built on top of that.” White sums up Google’s vision in one sentence: access to the world’s information in one click. “And in ‘ITS world’, in transportation system technology, we’ve always been thinking about that: how do we get information out there to me as fast as we can and as seamlessly and affordably?” she asks. White suggests that public sector organisations have often been left out of these conversations. “And we see a lot of momentum in really driving outcomes,” she insists. “I’ll give an example: our counterparts work with UPS to use our AI and cloud services to optimise all of their routes globally, and they can actually find information as where their packages are tracked - within up to 10 feet - with our technology. Why wouldn’t we use the same services and technology and ideas for government?” Google Public Sector has been working internally with Google Research and DeepMind, as well as geospatial specialists in Maps, Waze and StreetView, to create a ‘Google for Transportation’ strategy, which looks at four key areas.

I have a feeling we are just at the tip of the spear with changing lives with these technologies

@ITS International Magazine

INTERVIEW

“

New York MTA: keeping the trains running

It’s fascinating that we’re getting so many incoming inquiries on how to partner, how to scale these solutions

“

predictive analytics and asset management technology, that can help with that. And then the fourth area that I don’t hear a lot of our colleagues talking about is planning - and planning for the future. Our metropolitan planning organisations, our MPOs, are very strong partners to us. We try and serve them closely because they’re unsung heroes in this space. They’re not often thought about or talked about. They coordinate all these regional systems in the US - but they’re also responsible for planning for the future: 30-year, 50-year, long-range plans. And what better to envision the future than tools like artificial intelligence, helping plan how we build out our system, efficiently and seamlessly?” The epidemic of road deaths in the US – around 40,000 fatalities a year – is still a staggering statistic. The topic is highly personal. “I’ve had family members and loved ones get killed in crashes that technology could have prevented, which is why this is my life mission,” she says. “And as the statistics show, by the end of our phone call, we will have lost nearly 53 Americans due to road fatalities. And that is just unacceptable. Google Public Sector wants to be investing resources to help save lives, and so we’re looking in a few areas.” It is interested in particular in the Safe Systems approach, which suggests that no single factor will ‘solve’ road safety issues – rather it needs to be a series of interventions, from education, to engineering, to driver behaviour and so on. White cites work using AI to get public engagement with communities in Connecticut, Tennessee and elsewhere; and with state departments of transportation such as Oklahoma DoT, which is using Google’s AI to analyse the health of bridge structures. Workzone safety is another hot topic. “It’s funny,” she says. “As a personal aside, this was a technology I’d wanted to work on for nearly 16 years, and every partner or vendor I worked with said: ‘You know, Kristen, I just don’t think we can do it’. And with the power of a large company like Google Public Sector and our partner network, we developed and completed a proof of concept in less than six weeks.” Enormous challenge To achieve this, it worked with Carto, “a geospatial tool that is really central to making Google Maps the beautiful tool that it is”, and vision AI firm Clear Object, which can “take in camera footage and third-party data and integrate that into a tool that seamlessly provides information”.

White adds: “I would love us to see more focus on that, so that we can solve that enormous challenge and keep people safe. I’m hoping in another 10 years, we won’t have to talk about these issues. We’ll actually be seeing them in action.” Predictive crash analytics and asset management will be focuses this year, along with workzone technology, and there will be more on these at ITS America Conference & Expo 2026 in Detroit in June. For now, White admits to being astounded at the pace of progress on the workzone project. “I kept thinking: ‘Why can’t we bring this innovation to every government and every community?’ And that’s our charge.” However, is that really possible? Public and private sector mindsets – and money – are quite different. No-one can doubt White’s enthusiasm, experience or professionalism. But how realistic is her vision? She laughs: “Oh, it’s a great question: honestly, it’s one that I grapple with, because I actually think it’s less about changing companies like Google. I’m very proud to work here. I moved to Silicon Valley after my service for the administration in Washington, DC, because I want to evangelise this to our Silicon Valley counterparts. And our team is working really closely with partners like NVIDIA, Oracle and other companies to tell this story. I am very proud of those partnerships - but I do think, to your point, I would love to see hundreds more Google Public Sectors or public sector arms to these institutions, because then we really will transform an entire market. And until then, Google Public Sector has been working furiously to grow and support the community demand. It’s fascinating that we’re getting so many incoming inquiries on how to partner, how to scale these solutions, that it sometimes is hard to keep up with demand which is both a good thing, it’s a benefit - and a burden. And so maybe this is a challenge to our counterparts in the private sector to join our call to action!” Public-private partnerships For the private sector, this is perhaps a tough sell. But White insists: “I am so interested in public-private sector partnering in our industry. Google is a tech company: we have built these amazing search platforms, artificial intelligence technologies, and the cloud that houses all that data. But 80% of our work is co-built or built in partnership with other partners. And so watching our partner network, it’s very different than you would see elsewhere: we have partners that are large - from the For the latest on ITS America 2026 go to www.itsamericalive.com

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INTERVIEW

Making waves As an enormous company, Google has the power to make waves – which can make people quite nervous. “I hear what you’re saying, and I think what a lot of people are emoting in that sentiment is that when Google enters a market, we can change a market,” White says. “When Google decided 29 years ago we wanted to have a platform to search information, I remember when people told me, ‘Oh, go Google it. And I was like, what is that?’ And you kind of scoffed at it, right? Because it was, again, early on that curve of innovation. But Google has continued to grow and scale, and now we have 30 different companies, whether it’s Waymo and self-driving technologies to our cloud platforms, we have been able to really transform the way people seek and get information.” So for any transportation professionals who’ve been wondering for some time what happens when Google gets into the game, wonder no more. “We are!” White says. “And we’re changing lives and literally saving lives!” She says that USDoT now is a Google customer, using the company’s workspace platforms, and Gemini Enterprise AI, and part of the use case is to regulate federal motor carriers “and keep those drivers and truckers safe”. This is close to her heart too. “My dad’s best friend was killed after he was over his hours of service and fell asleep at the wheel,” she says. “And now we have technologies that can prevent that from happening, and Google’s at the heart of that in this sector.” ITS

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The first step to human-centred design is empathetic inquiry: that means empathising with the customer

Google Public Sector is working on workzone safety initiatives

have this conversation in 2031, with similar questions, and see where we are. Because I have a feeling we are just at the tip of the spear with changing lives with these technologies.”

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Deloittes and Accentures - to really small AI start-ups that might not know intelligent transportation systems or these particular problem statements.” White goes back to the example of workzone technology. “If you bring on the right partner who is willing to lean into the Safe Systems approach, to learning about how government works, to learning about the specific use case I shared earlier, you can develop solutions within less than six weeks. And so maybe that’s the call to action, that I am hoping this pie only gets bigger, rather than having smaller pieces for folks. And maybe, to your point, that’s a little bit naïve - but I’m still hopeful we could scale technology innovation for government.” Not naïve, perhaps, but it’s certainly difficult. However, White is buoyed by reaction to showcasing co-developed technologies at April’s Google Next event in Las Vegas. There was a “buzz” on the show floor, she says: “Just seeing the amount of interest in using Google technology to advance these goals was really powerful. So there is an energy, there is a willingness to innovate and try new things.” Another point she makes is that we are very, very early in this new era of artificial intelligence. “In our partner summits, we actually start off with the reminder that this is a similar cataclysmic technology invention like the personal computer or the advent of the Internet,” White suggests. “Those took a few years to really start to ideate and hone the technology and then scale. As Gartner reminds us, we are still in the early hype of that hype-cycle curve. And of course, these are all predictions: it could be 2030 before artificial intelligence is widely used. Our corporate publications have shown that over 54% of government workers are already using artificial intelligence and embedding them into their work, and that’s only in 2026! I would love to

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SOFTWARE © Alphaspirit | Dreamstime.com

Game plan Big events attract big crowds – and two of the biggest are coming up: the Fifa World Cup and the LA28 Olympics. Adam Hill recently moderated a webinar with PTV Group which looked at how simulation helps move fans safely ‘from sofa to seat’…

et’s look ahead: the next Olympic and Paralympic Games - LA 2028 in Los Angeles – are very much on the horizon, just two years away. But before that, it won’t have escaped your attention that a certain major football tournament is about to begin. The Fifa World Cup – 48 teams, 16 stadiums, 104 matches, hundreds of thousands of fans – will run across three countries: the US, Canada and Mexico. As logistical challenges go, it’s a big one. In May, ITS International partnered with PTV Group on a webinar called ‘Major Events & Venues – From Gut Feeling to Simulation-Based Planning’ which looked

at how software can help authorities move people to and from stadiums. In large part, it is about the shift from intuition (how we think things might work) to data-driven decision-making (predicting what is actually going to happen): cities, event organisers, and others need simulations to ensure the process is as smooth, efficient and safe as possible. Cascading bottlenecks For example, how are pedestrians going to interact with cars around the venue – and vice versa? How do you stop metro station platforms getting too crowded? And how will people themselves behave once they’re inside, queueing at the turnstiles or waiting

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in line for hotdogs? Where are the bottlenecks going to be? These are big issues in high-stakes environments. Michael Tschanz, founder of Tschanz Technologies, used to lead Disney’s Engineering and Simulation group, tasked with making immersive experiences at theme parks work for everyone. When you consider that Walt Disney World covers 47 square miles – about the size of Boston or San Francisco, with four main parks and two water parks – then you can see Tschanz is well-versed in the variables of moving people around multiple locations. And you will help yourself if you get things right from the beginning, he says: “You don't want to do major investments in ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

SOFTWARE

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Frida Aspnäs WSP Sweden This is particularly important when considering how, say, 45,000 visitors will safely exit an arena within a 15-minute period – as is the case in Slakthusområdet, a former industrial area of Swedish capital Stockholm, where major venues such as Avicii Arena and 3Arena are now located. Aspnäs explains that simulation helped create infrastructure that can handle both regular day-to-day traffic, and event traffic, and assess how it performs both at a strategic and detailed level – looking at critical areas such as ticket control points, metro entrances and the planned bridges to connect the arenas to a new metro station. “By using the simulation, we were able to identify potential bottlenecks and problem areas, and we could test alternative design solutions, so we could improve pedestrian flow, and also ensure safe and efficient crowd movements in a broad range of conditions,” Aspnäs explains. The simulation threw up several important insights: firstly, for everything to flow properly, additional security screening zones were required during events to prevent queues from building up; second, another pedestrian bridge would be required; and third, metro frequency needed to be higher during events in order to stop platforms getting crowded.

For just this purpose, PTV Group has tools such as Vissim, which simulates traffic flow across intersections and corridors; and Viswalk (used in the Stockholm stadium project), which depicts how pedestrians interact with one another. The first step is to create a static replica of the work, such as streets, buildings, traffic lights, and so on; once you have this base model, then you can start making a comparison of the simulated reality against the observed reality. “It's about the system,” PTV senior product manager Matthias Pfriem explains. “We have one model for realistic pedestrian movement, another one for road vehicle movement, another to move the rail vehicles, and this allows full integration: so you have the train arriving in the subway, or the car on the parking lot, and then the visitor finds his way to the venue, he enters the stadium, maybe goes through a security check, or another kind of delay, and arrives at the destination in the stadium at a specific seat. You can call it ‘from sofa to seat’. We cover the whole chain.” Gut reaction Gut reaction won’t help planners, even in an area with which they are very familiar, if there is an unusual influx of people and vehicles – such as there will be for the cities hosting the Fifa World Cup.

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It's about being useful, a practical tool for the engineer

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Capturing complexity Experienced operators might be tempted to rely on their own experience of previous events, rather than simulation, but there is a risk to this, warns Frida Aspnäs, transport consultant at WSP Sweden. “You may not fully capture the complexity of the large pedestrian flows that you have for these areas,” she says. “Because for these environments you have a large number of people moving to relatively small spaces over very short periods of time, especially if you're looking at emptying an arena. Experience can definitely provide a good baseline for evaluating and assessing how well the pedestrians will be able to move to an area - but simulation adds another layer of insight. It allows us to test different flow scenarios and design alternatives, and helps us to understand how the space performs under varying conditions.”

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A key part of building trust when it comes to simulation results is being transparent about what a simulation is - and what it's not

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large-scale facilities without understanding how everything's going to operate when they're fully functional. I always like to say: ‘Pixels are cheaper than steel’. Take the time to do the analysis, make sure that you have done a thorough job of modelling all of your entities and all of your environments.” Simulation helps engineers understand the flow of individuals and transport modes – in Disney’s case, car, bus, train, monorail, water craft, parking garages – to get to their destinations. Not least it means you can avoid the phenomenon of ‘cascading bottlenecks’. “You need to study the area working as a whole, because you just don't want to fix one bottleneck and have it end up creating another bottleneck somewhere else,” Tschanz says.

Matthias Pfriem PTV

I always like to say: ‘Pixels are cheaper than steel’. Take the time to do the analysis

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ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

Michael Tschanz Tschanz Technologies

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SOFTWARE

Working out bottlenecks in advance will boost safety

“People that are familiar with their current environment, their current experiences in any of those municipalities, they won't be able to lean on that as much when your entire input matrix has changed dramatically,” Michael Tschanz points out. “And so this is where I think simulation shines, especially if you've already got a model built.” Taking the time to get validated models in place will allow planning to flex through the entire lifecycle of an environment, whatever changes come. “Let's say you've modelled an entire downtown area and you have a lot of people coming in for the World Cup,” Tschanz continues. “Well, if you've been studying that for a really long time and you already have those models built, then you can put an entirely new input table where you have a dramatically large increase in demand across all those roads and streets, from pedestrians to cars and trains and everything else. Then you can go ahead and study it and see what those results will be, and then maybe make changes in order to be able to accommodate. But you can't really lean on an experience base if you haven't really seen anything like that before. So that you got to consider all those variabilities.” It’s particularly useful when you’re dealing with – as you may be at the Olympics, for example – the double-whammy of temporary venues (not usually used for sports, such as cultural landmarks which have been chosen to host volleyball or archery events) and extreme peak loads of people. Drop-off and wayfinding “When it comes to physical design, we will look at how the area can be structured using temporary or permanent infrastructure to support safe and efficient movements,” says Aspnäs. “And when it comes to crowd management, you have to look at how you can help people to move around in this area. How can you work with signs? How

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

can you work with wayfinding? How can you work with people just standing there or [should you have] staff instructing people how to move around?” With temporary venues, it will not be possible to fix everything with physical infrastructure. “You have to look at how the public transport operates for this area, how do the pick-up and the drop-off areas function, and how will people actually move between the parking and the drop-off zone and the public transportation system?” she asks. “It's important not to just look at the venue itself, but also look at how will people actually get to there.” So while the benefits of simulation are clear, it is important that clients understand their limitations. “A key part of building trust when it comes to simulation results is being transparent about what a simulation is - and what it's not,” insists Aspnäs. Future scenarios Simulation tools are there to support the decision-making process: “It is not an exact representation of the reality, so it's very important that you are aware of what limitations you have.” It’s also vital to understand what should be given the most attention when putting the model together. “You can spend hours and hours - you can spend years - on collecting data,” Aspnäs continues. “For example, at a train station, you can spend many, many hours collecting the exact data of how many seconds does it take for a person to enter the train. But then you have to think is that data important, if it takes one second, or if it takes 1.1 seconds?” However, one of the biggest strengths with using simulation is the ability to show how people will really move around an area such as a stadium. “It's very important in order to get clients to understand how they are working with future flows or with a different design, and I also think that it's very

important to tell the clients that it's better that we are testing and identifying issues in a model. It's way more cost-effective to test it in a model than building an area that doesn't work,” she adds. Models also allow you to test variations of many different scenarios. “Typically, you would not simulate one version of one specific future, but you would make iterations and variations of it, use a kind of randomisation to have a robust solution against multiple versions of this one possible future,” Pfriem explains. “And you do that for all the futures, so you cover quite an extensive scenario space. And, of course, this is what would never be possible in reality, but it allows for safe and robust planning.” He concludes: “I think a big part is really to understand what a model is, if it's the exact reality or not. A model is a model! There's this famous quote: ‘All models are wrong, but some of them are useful’. Let me explain: ‘wrong’ in that sense means, it's an approximation; an abstract approximated representation of reality. But it's about being useful, a practical tool for the engineer.” ITS O To view the webinar go to:

www.ptvgroup.com/en/webinar-majorevents-recording-request

Frida Aspnäs

Michael Tschanz

Adam Hill

Matthias Pfriem

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North AmericaEdition

BUILD AMERICA, BUY AMERICA ACT

Brave New Build

Build America, Buy America regulations are changing the game for ITS folk doing business in the US. We ask a few companies what the new rules have meant for them…

significant portion of ITS deployments in the US rely on federal funding – and the recent introduction of Build America, Buy America (BABA) regulations means ITS firms now have a number of hoops to jump through. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)’s termination of waivers that broadly exempted manufactured products from compliance requirements marks a line in the sand which shifts responsibility for compliance directly onto manufacturers and suppliers. “BABA compliance is not a checkbox exercise — it is an existential market access question for any OEM that sells into the US federal-aid highway ecosystem,” explains John E. Shearer, CEO of Hi-Tek Electronics.

“If your products are not compliant, your agency customers cannot use them on federally-funded projects without going through the waiver process, and federal waivers are no longer automatic.” BABA compliance has become “a critical requirement for companies that want to participate seriously in the US ITS infrastructure market”, agrees Paul Gray, CEO of Cohda Wireless. “A very large proportion of ITS deployments in the US involve federal funding, either directly or through state and local transportation agencies. For Cohda, this is about being ready for where the market is going. We have been active in the US connected vehicle and roadside infrastructure market for many years, and we see BABA compliance as part of our

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long-term commitment to that market. Our customers need confidence that the technology they select can be deployed into federally-funded programmes.” Mandatory specification Jane Lee, Ettifos global business development manager, points out that, even when suppliers are contracted through a state, city, or county agency, BABA requirements still apply if the project is supported by federal grants. “Without BABA-compliant products, companies may be unable to participate in federally-funded projects altogether,” she adds. “While waivers can still be requested, securing them has become significantly more difficult. In many cases, waiver requests may be challenged if a competing supplier can © ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

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BUILD AMERICA, BUY AMERICA ACT North AmericaEdition

Even greater challenge And an even greater challenge is approaching, she points out. From 1 October this year, compliance will extend beyond manufacturing location requirements to include a 55% domestic

cost threshold for manufactured products. “This is particularly difficult for ITS suppliers because many critical components used in ITS technologies, including PCBAs, semiconductors, and sensors, are rarely manufactured domestically,” Lee continues. “In addition, the component cost verification process is extremely granular. Manufacturers must account for the origin and cost contribution of individual components throughout the supply chain. This can create additional complexity, especially when subvendors are unwilling or unable to provide the detailed sourcing and cost information required.” Swarco McCain’s Jimi Meshulam adds: “Companies must also establish end-to-end supply chain traceability, maintain US-based manufacturing processes, and be prepared with thorough documentation, audit readiness, and reliable domestic sourcing.” For Shearer, there is a “stack” of hurdles. “They interact with each other in ways that make the compliance journey genuinely challenging for OEMs who have built their product lines and supply chains around offshore production assumptions,” he says. “I have seen companies believe they could achieve compliance by simply adding a US address label or doing a final test cycle on an otherwise offshore-built product. That is not compliance — it is a compliance risk. The rule is unambiguous: the manufacturing step must create a product with different

Ettifos: establishing relationships with suitable US-based manufacturing partners

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BABA compliance is now a fundamental requirement to compete in the US ITS market

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demonstrate that a compliant domestic alternative already exists.” This creates uncertainty which agencies would far rather do without, insists Shearer. “When I talk to state DoT procurement officers and systems integrators, the message is consistent: they do not want to deal with waiver paperwork, they do not want the procurement risk of a noncompliant product showing up in a federal audit, and they are increasingly building 'Buy America-compliant' as a mandatory specification criterion,” he says. “If your product is not on that list, you are not in the conversation.” That being the case, the hurdles companies face to achieve compliance are both administrative and operational, explains Lee. “For smaller overseas ITS companies like ourselves, one of the biggest hurdles is identifying and establishing relationships with suitable US-based manufacturing partners,” she says. “Larger companies, meanwhile, often face the far more complex task of relocating or restructuring manufacturing operations within the US to satisfy compliance requirements.”

Jimi Meshulam Swarco McCain

properties than its inputs.” The biggest challenge is really understanding what compliance means for Cohda’s products and supply chain, and then making sure the firm can stand behind it, says Paul Gray. “That means looking closely at where products are manufactured, how suppliers are managed, and what evidence is needed for federally-funded projects. From Cohda’s perspective, it has been something we have taken seriously and worked through deliberately. The important thing for our customers is that we can support them with our MK6 product that aligns with BABA requirements for applicable US ITS deployments.” Even though the rules are unambiguous, BABA compliance “has had a foggy start”, suggests Sébastian Lodahl of Sensys Networks: “Many companies initially interpreted it as requiring only last-mile manufacturing in the US - meeting the letter of the law but not its intent.” Deeper challenge But investing in US-based manufacturing and supplier relationships is vital, he goes on – although a bigger problem may be coming down the track. “A deeper challenge is that many electronic components and chips simply aren't manufactured in the US anymore,” Lodahl points out. “At some point, the availability of US-sourced components will significantly constrain the innovation that manufacturers can bring to market.” He says Sensys is “fortunate to be ahead of the curve” because it had already localised much of the firm’s manufacturing in the US years before BABA requirements were introduced. “Our decision was originally driven by quality control, production oversight, and lead-time improvements,” he confirms. “As a result, we needed to make very few operational changes to meet compliance requirements.” But other companies which talked to ITS International have had to make a series of specific changes to their operations.

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BUILD AMERICA, BUY AMERICA ACT North AmericaEdition For instance, Cohda has established the capability to manufacture MK6 devices in the US, while Swarco McCain expanded with a 25,000 sq ft San Diego facility to achieve full BABA compliance for all its manufactured product lines. Ettifos established a dedicated internal team focused specifically on managing the administrative, manufacturing, supply chain, and quality assurance requirements associated with BABA compliance. “This team works closely with our US-based manufacturing partner in Houston, Texas, to ensure all production processes align with current federal requirements,” explains Lee. “From an operational perspective, this meant implementing additional oversight procedures, including regular facility visits, manufacturing audits, process validation, training, and continuous coordination between both organisations.” The partners also introduced more structured documentation and traceability processes to help verify manufacturing origin and maintain compliance records throughout production. “Beyond manufacturing itself, achieving compliance also required a deeper evaluation of our supply chain and component sourcing practices,” Lee says. “As domestic content requirements continue to evolve, particularly with upcoming cost-threshold regulations, greater

Cohda Wireless has established capability to manufacture MK6 devices in the US

visibility into component origin and supplier documentation has become increasingly important. Overall, BABA compliance is not simply a certification step — it requires ongoing operational alignment, supply chain management, and close collaboration between engineering, manufacturing, and

compliance teams to ensure standards continue to be met over time.” Manufacturing transformation At Hi-Tek Electronics, Shearer thinks there is a lot of sense in cooperation. “The path to BABA compliance is fundamentally a

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agencies increasingly prioritise supply chain resilience, domestic manufacturing, and regulatory certainty when evaluating ITS technology partners.”

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BABA requirements are likely to become more stringent over time rather than more flexible

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manufacturing transformation — and for most OEMs who have historically built their products offshore, it is not something they can do in isolation,” he says. “The most practical and efficient path I have seen for ITS companies is to partner with a qualified US contract electronics manufacturer who already has the infrastructure, certifications, and supply chain relationships in place.” The question of how much of a competitive advantage BABA compliance gives you is an interesting one. “With our already significant US presence, it positions Swarco McCain to more easily support federally-funded ITS projects that non-compliant competitors may not be able to support,” says Meshulam. “It also gives agencies greater confidence through US-based facilities, customer inspection capability, audit infrastructure, and planned alignment with NEMA Domestic Content certification.” For Sébastian Lodahl at Sensys, it’s harder to quantify: “The programme is only as strong as its definition and enforcement - and both have taken several years to evolve.” However, he adds: “What I can say is that manufacturing in the US has already given us significant operational advantages in oversight and quality control.” Jane Lee at Ettifos believes it is a “significant competitive advantage” in the

North AmericaEdition

Jane Lee Ettifos

ITS market. “In many cases, suppliers that cannot demonstrate compliance may be deemed ‘non-responsive’, resulting in immediate disqualification from the bidding process,” she adds. “By being BABAcompliant, Ettifos can provide customers with greater confidence and reduce procurement-related uncertainty. This allows agencies to focus more directly on the goals of their deployments rather than navigating ongoing compliance and administrative challenges. In addition, BABA compliance positions suppliers more favourably for long-term public sector opportunities as

Future-proofing compliance It’s one thing becoming BABA-compliant; it’s quite another to ‘future proof’ compliance against regulatory changes. To do this, companies need to “build compliance into operations, not treat it as paperwork”, advises Jimi Meshulam at Swarco McCain. “That means domestic sourcing plans, supplier documentation, facility-level process certification, auditready records, flexible US manufacturing capacity, and continued investment ahead of future thresholds.” Proactive supply chain engineering and long-term sourcing strategy is the way to go as far as Ettifos is concerned. “For components that are currently only available from non-designated countries, companies should begin identifying and qualifying potential domestic alternatives now, rather than waiting for future regulations to tighten further,” suggests Lee. Building flexibility into the supply chain early will be critical as domestic content requirements continue to evolve. “Companies should also invest in stronger

âƆǉƭɥ¼ƭćȚ ɥɥĤɥ¤ƭƆīǉĤǁƵɥtĲĲīɥ ɥ ƆŸƪůŗćźĤĲɩɥ ÜĲɥ%ĲůŗǡĲƭɥSǁɩ ÜŗǁŒɥƆǡĲƭɥȪȦɥǨĲćƭƵɥƆŊɥŸćźǉŊćĤǁǉƭŗźŋɥĲǧƪĲƭǁŗƵĲɥćźīɥćɥǁĲćŸɥīĲĲƪůǨɥƭƆƆǁĲīɥŗźɥǁŒĲɥǁƭćȚ ɥɥĤɥŗźīǉƵǁƭǨɪɥ Nŗɾ¼ĲŬɥ/ůĲĤǁƭƆźŗĤƵɥīĲůŗǡĲƭƵɥŒŗŋŒɾƬǉćůŗǁǨɪɥŊǉůůɾǁǉƭźŬĲǨɥĲůĲĤǁƭƆźŗĤɥĤƆźǁƭćĤǁɥŸćźǉŊćĤǁǉƭŗźŋɥģǉŗůǁɥŊƆƭɥǁŒĲɥ ŗźǁĲůůŗŋĲźǁɥǁƭćźƵƪƆƭǁćǁŗƆźɥƵǨƵǁĲŸƵɥʉS¼¯ʊɥƵĲĤǁƆƭɩɥ ǉƭɥÃɩ¯ɩɾģćƵĲīɥćīǡćźĤĲīɥŸćźǉŊćĤǁǉƭŗźŋɥŊćĤŗůŗǁǨɥ ĤƆŸģŗźĲƵɥƪƭĲĤŗƵŗƆźɪɥĲȚ ɥɥĤŗĲźĤǨɪɥćźīɥƵĤćůćģŗůŗǁǨɥǁƆɥƵǉƪƪƆƭǁɥǨƆǉƭɥǁƭćȚ ɥɥĤɥƪƭƆīǉĤǁƵɥćǁɥĲǡĲƭǨɥƵǁćŋĲɥƆŊɥ ƪƭƆīǉĤǁŗƆźɥʁɥŊƭƆŸɥƵǁćƭǁɥǁƆɥȞɥźŗƵŒɩ ǉƭɥ ɾĤƆŸƪůŗćźǁɥĤćƪćģŗůŗǁŗĲƵɥĲźƵǉƭĲɥīĲƪĲźīćģůĲɪɥĲźīɾǁƆɾĲźīɥŸćźǉŊćĤǁǉƭŗźŋɥŊƆƭɥĲǡĲƭǨɥƪƭƆũĲĤǁɩ FƆƭɥŸƆƭĲɥŗźŊƆƭŸćǁŗƆźɪɥĲŸćŗůɥ BABA@HiTekQuality.com

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BUILD AMERICA, BUY AMERICA ACT North AmericaEdition supplier visibility, documentation processes, and traceability systems so they can adapt more efficiently to future compliance audits or changes in domestic content thresholds,” she adds. Paul Gray says that for Cohda Wireless: “It is about understanding our supply chain, keeping good records, staying close to customers and project requirements, and being ready to adapt as guidance changes. We have approached this as part of our long-term commitment to the US market. We want our customers to have confidence that we are not only meeting the requirements today but are also paying attention to where the market and regulatory environment are heading.” Align with the intent, not just the current BABA framework, insists Sensys’ Sébastian Lodahl. “Regulations will keep evolving, but the purpose of BABA is clear: meaningful domestic manufacturing and supply chains,” he explains. “Companies that genuinely embrace that - keeping large portions of their supply chain in the US - will be far better positioned than those doing superficial 'final assembly' simply to satisfy today's compliance checklist.” “Ultimately, organisations that treat compliance as an ongoing strategic initiative, rather than a short-term

certification exercise, will be better positioned to navigate future regulatory changes with minimal disruption,” says Lee. Direction of travel And however you approach it, the direction of travel is clear: everyone doing ITS business in the US will have to achieve compliance. “Federal infrastructure investment is only increasing, and BABA compliance is the price of entry for that market,” says Gray. “BABA compliance is now a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator,” says Lodahl. “Companies that proactively

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Manufacturing in the US has already given us significant operational advantages in oversight and quality control

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Sébastian Lodahl Sensys Networks

adapt now will be in a much stronger position than those waiting for compliance requirements to become unavoidable.” At Ettifos, Jane Lee says: "While some companies are still anticipating potential delays in implementation or broader availability of waivers, particularly for manufactured products, the overall regulatory direction appears clear. Current trends suggest that BABA requirements are likely to become more stringent over time rather than more flexible. As a result, it seems companies that intend on competing in the US ITS market long term will increasingly need to treat BABA compliance as a strategic necessity rather than an optional consideration. “As more federally-funded ITS deployments move forward, agencies are placing greater emphasis on procurement readiness, domestic manufacturing alignment, and long-term supply chain reliability. Companies that proactively prepare for these expectations will likely be in a much stronger position as the market continues to evolve.” “Because so many major intersection and infrastructure programmes use federal funding, companies that want broad access to the US ITS market will likely need a credible BABA compliance path,”

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BABA compliance 'is an existential market access question for any OEM that sells into the US federal-aid highway ecosystem', says Hi-Tek's John Shearer

says Meshulam. “BABA compliance is now a fundamental requirement to compete in the US ITS market. It ensures eligibility for federally-funded infrastructure programmes while reinforcing supply chain resilience and transparency. The last word goes to Shearer, who thinks BABA compliance will be a necessity

“unequivocally and without reservation”. And BABA is here to stay. “I have had this conversation with OEM executives from Europe and Asia who believe this is a temporary political posture that will be reversed,” Shearer concludes. “I think they are making a significant strategic error. The 40-year general waiver that

gave everyone a free pass is not coming back. The US is committed to reshoring critical infrastructure manufacturing, and ITS products — which sit at the intersection of transportation infrastructure and cybersecurity — are exactly the kind of category that will face increasing domestic content scrutiny, not decreasing.” ITS

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ROAD SAFETY North AmericaEdition

Intersections need safety layer that aviation built decades ago Derq’s Georges Aoude suggests road transportation can learn by looking to the skies

ntersections remain one of the most predictable points of risk in our transportation networks. Road safety has long focused on better vehicles, stronger enforcement, clearer signage, and more public awareness. All of that matters. But it still leaves too much responsibility on individual road users to detect conflict, interpret intent, and react in time. Aviation took a different path. Aircraft don’t operate in isolation. Safety in the air depends on structured communication, shared awareness, and infrastructure that identifies and resolves risks before they become disasters. Pilots are highly trained, but aviation safety wasn’t built by assuming perfect human judgment in every moment. It was built by creating a system that reduces uncertainty and supports better real-time decisions. Aviation relies on mandatory communication and shared system design. Roads largely don't, so that gap is especially clear at intersections, which concentrate the conditions that make road safety difficult: competing movements, limited visibility, changing signals, pedestrian crossings, cyclist interactions, and unpredictability. These are everyday scenarios, not edge cases. Conflict and understanding Today, most traffic infrastructure can control movement, but it can’t truly understand it. It may know the signal state, but not whether a vehicle is unlikely to stop, whether a pedestrian is entering conflict, or whether

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a near-miss pattern is emerging that signals deeper risk. In most cases, agencies learn where the danger is only after crashes accumulate. In aerospace, the goal isn’t simply to respond once something goes wrong. It’s to maintain a shared, real-time picture of the environment so conflicts can be detected early and addressed before they escalate. Aircraft continuously share position and movement, and ground systems help create a common operating picture. That shared awareness helps humans and automated systems spot and resolve conflicts before paths intersect. Roads need their own version of that shared safety layer. That doesn’t mean treating streets exactly like airspace. Roads are messier, more open, and more variable. But the principle still applies: safer systems don’t depend on isolated actors making perfect decisions with incomplete information. Risk and movement At intersections, intelligence needs to live in the infrastructure itself. An intelligent intersection can detect road users in real time, interpret movement and identify elevated-risk situations before a crash occurs. Sensors and edge AI can help infrastructure move beyond passive control—seeing conflict patterns, detecting dangerous approaches, and enabling earlier warnings or interventions. Detection, prediction, alert, and action can work as a continuous loop, supported by AI-powered ITS and V2X, where relevant. This matters because the next step in

road safety won’t come from asking more of road users. It'll come from building environments that provide greater visibility, richer context, and earlier warning signs of danger. The tools already exist. What’s still missing is the willingness to treat intelligent intersections as infrastructure rather than pilots or operational add-ons. If aviation teaches us anything, it’s that safety improves when communication is structured, awareness is shared, and the system itself is designed to anticipate conflict. Roads, especially at intersections, still ask too much of individual perception alone. We should keep improving vehicles. We should keep enforcing laws and educating road users. But if we want a meaningful step change in safety, we need infrastructure that does more than manage movement. We need infrastructure that helps prevent harm. Intersections don’t have to remain places where visibility is partial, and prevention comes too late. We can make them more intelligent, more responsive, and far safer— today. ITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Georges Aoude is the co-founder and CEO of MIT spin-off Derq Follow us on LinkedIn

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June 9-12, 2026 Huntington Place, Detroit, Michigan

EMPOWERING INNOVATION ITS America Conference & Expo, taking place June 9-12, 2026 at the Huntington Place, Detroit, Michigan, will explore Empowering Innovation and bring together the entire intelligent transportation community for thought-provoking education, networking, and demonstrations exploring the technologies and solutions that will enable a better future.

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BUILD AMERICA, BUY AMERICA

BABA: The regulatory landscape that changed everything Every OEM selling into the US market needs to know about BABA compliance: John E. Shearer, CEO of Hi-Tek Electronics, outlines how it came into being – and why it matters so much…

or more than four decades — since 1983 — the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) maintained what was known as the Manufactured Products General Waiver, a blanket exception that effectively shielded foreign-manufactured products from domestic content requirements on federally-funded US highway projects. For the ITS industry, this waiver was the status quo. OEMs around the world could design, fabricate, and ship their products from factories in Asia, Europe, or elsewhere, and as long as those products performed to specification, they were eligible for use on US federal-aid projects. That era ended definitively on January 14, 2025, when FHWA published its Buy America Requirements for Manufactured Products Final Rule, terminating the general waiver and establishing the framework we now call BABA compliance — aligned with the

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Build America, Buy America Act (BABA) that was enacted under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The rule took effect on March 17, 2025, and the implementation clock is now ticking toward two critical compliance deadlines. Phase 1, effective October 1, 2025, requires that all manufactured products permanently incorporated into federallyfunded highway projects must undergo final assembly in the US. Phase 2, effective October 1, 2026, layers on the 55% domestic content requirement: the cost of components mined, produced, or manufactured in the US must exceed 55% of the total component cost of the manufactured product. For ITS products specifically — traffic signal controllers, cabinets, detection systems, dynamic message signs, communication hardware, and related electronic systems installed in the highway right-of-way — these rules are not abstract regulatory language. They represent a fundamental

restructuring of the global supply chain model that has dominated the industry for a generation. 01. Why is BABA compliance so important for ITS companies? The scale of the US federal-aid highway programme is enormous. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed approximately $1.2 trillion to infrastructure investment over five years, with hundreds of billions flowing specifically to transportation and ITS-related projects. FHWA's Title 23 programmes fund the lion's share of traffic signal upgrades, smart corridor deployments, advanced traffic management systems, intersection safety technology, and connected vehicle infrastructure in cities and states across the country. Any product permanently incorporated into one of these projects must now be BABA-compliant. The ITS product category carries an additional layer of complexity. FHWA's

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I would put it this way: BABA compliance is your entry ticket to the most significant infrastructure funding cycle the US has seen in a generation. Without it, you are sitting on the outside looking in, watching your compliant competitors write the business. 02. What are the main hurdles companies face to achieve compliance? The primary obstacles I see in the ITS industry fall into several distinct categories: •

final rule specifically calls out intelligent transportation systems and other electronic hardware systems installed in the highway right-of-way for distinct treatment. Cabinets or enclosures for ITS products that consist predominantly of iron or steel must meet separate domestic iron and steel requirements — on top of the manufactured product assembly and content requirements. This dual-compliance obligation makes the ITS sector uniquely affected by these regulations. Beyond regulatory compliance, the business case for BABA compliance is straightforward. The federal-aid highway programme is the largest, single funding source for ITS infrastructure deployment in the US. Losing access to that market segment — or being forced to compete through costly, uncertain waiver applications — puts non-compliant OEMs at a severe structural disadvantage against competitors who have invested in US manufacturing. Follow us on LinkedIn

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1. Supply Chain Transparency and Component Tracking BABA compliance requires a manufacturer to know, at a granular level, the origin and cost allocation of every component in their product — not just the major assemblies, but down to PCBs, connectors, semiconductors, firmware modules, and electromechanical components. Unlike aerospace, defence, and medical, ITS and traffic product OEMs source from global supply chains, and this level of traceability is often simply absent. Many manufacturers have never had to produce a detailed Bill of Materials with component-level origin documentation because the old general waiver made that exercise unnecessary. Existing contract manufacturers may already provide traceability for regulated industries and can extend that capability to traffic and ITS OEMs. 2. The Semiconductor and Microelectronics Challenge This is arguably the most technically difficult piece of the puzzle for

electronic ITS products. The global semiconductor supply chain is dominated by fabrication in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China. A traffic signal controller, detection system, or communication device may contain dozens of ICs, microprocessors, FPGAs, and other electronic components where truly domestic US sourcing is unavailable at any price. The 55% domestic content threshold by cost — not by count — means manufacturers must do very careful cost modelling to understand where they stand. In many cases, the electronics in the product are actually a relatively small percentage of total cost when you factor in the mechanical, structural, wiring, and firmware components, which can make the math more workable. But this analysis takes real engineering and supply chain work to execute. 3. The Final Assembly Definitional Trap FHWA's final rule is explicit: importing a finished product and simply relabelling, repackaging, or performing minor adjustments in the US does not constitute manufacturing in the US. The regulation requires that final manufacturing involves a genuine change to the product — creating a product with different properties than the individual inputs. This means disassembling a foreignmade product and reassembling it identically in the US does not count. OEMs who think they can solve BABA compliance by shipping knocked-down kits and conducting light-touch assembly at a US facility need to read the rule very carefully. ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

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4. Capital Investment Requirements Establishing or qualifying a US manufacturing partner, building out production tooling, qualifying new domestic component suppliers, and validating a domestically assembled product against existing performance standards all require capital, time, and engineering resources. For smaller OEMs with limited balance sheets, these investments can be genuinely prohibitive without a clear roadmap and the right manufacturing partner. 5. Documentation and Certification Burden BABA compliance is not self-certifying. Manufacturers must be prepared to provide detailed cost documentation, supplier declarations, and compliance certifications to agencies and prime contractors. This administrative infrastructure must be built and maintained. Many OEMs have limited or no experience generating the kinds of domestic content attestations that an audit may require.

aggregate domestic content percentage must be calculated. Where that calculation falls short of 55%, OEMs must identify alternative domestic-source components, even if that requires engineering redesign of certain subsystems. This is not merely a purchasing exercise — it often requires engineering collaboration to qualify replacement components that meet the product's performance specifications. US FINAL ASSEMBLY QUALIFICATION OEMs must identify and qualify a US manufacturing facility for final assembly. This facility must be capable of receiving and integrating the product's components through genuine manufacturing steps — not

just packaging or testing. The ideal partner already holds relevant quality management certifications such as ISO 9001:2015, AS9100D, or ISO 13485, which provide the documented process controls and traceability that BABA compliance documentation requires. DOMESTIC SUPPLIER QUALIFICATION Where existing suppliers are foreign-based, OEMs must either identify domestic alternatives or perform the cost analysis to confirm that the foreign components involved do not prevent them from crossing the 55% domestic content threshold for 2026, and possibly higher for 2027 and beyond. In some cases, the answer is to concentrate © Hi-Tek Electronics

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03. What specific changes do companies need to make for BABA compliance? From a practical operational standpoint, achieving BABA compliance requires action across several fronts: BILL OF MATERIALS (BOM) AUDIT AND REDESIGN The compliance journey begins with a full BOM audit. Every component must be identified by origin and cost, and the Follow us on LinkedIn

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COMPLIANCE DOCUMENTATION INFRASTRUCTURE OEMs must build the documentation infrastructure to support BABA compliance certification. This includes supplier declarations of origin, cost allocation worksheets by component, domestic content percentage calculations, and country-of-origin documentation for all materials. These records must be maintained and be auditable, as they may be subject to review by federal agencies, prime contractors, or FHWA itself. ITS-SPECIFIC CABINET AND ENCLOSURE REQUIREMENTS ITS product manufacturers must specifically address the cabinet and enclosure provisions of the final rule. FHWA regulations require that cabinets or other enclosures for ITS systems that consist predominantly of iron or steel must meet domestic iron and steel requirements — a requirement that applies to all ITS projects regardless of obligation date. This means that traffic signal cabinets, controller enclosures, and roadside equipment housings must source their steel and iron content from domestic steel producers. For an ITS OEM, the most efficient path to compliance is almost always to work with a certified US contract manufacturer who can take ownership of the final assembly step and provide the documentation infrastructure that federal procurement requires. You do not have to build a factory

— but you do have to have a genuine US manufacturing relationship that results in a fundamentally American-made product. 04 How much of a competitive advantage does BABA compliance give you? The competitive dynamics of BABA compliance in the ITS space are playing out along several dimensions. In the near term, the OEMs and equipment manufacturers who achieved compliance ahead of the October 2025 deadline have a real first-mover advantage in federal-aid project opportunities. State DoTs, metropolitan planning organisations, and systems integrators are actively updating their preferred vendor lists and approved product lists to reflect BABA compliance status. A non-compliant product that was freely specified in 2023 may now be effectively locked out of the procurement process without a costly and uncertain waiver application. Longer term, BABA compliance creates structural competitive advantages in several ways. First, it eliminates exposure to the waiver process, which requires agency-byagency requests, public notice periods, and FHWA review — a timeline and process risk that can delay project schedules. Second, it positions compliant OEMs favourably with respect to grant-application-scoring criteria, since many federal discretionary grant programmes already score Buy America compliance as a factor. Third, it creates a defensible marketing position that resonates with both procurement officers and the elected officials who increasingly pay attention to domestic manufacturing narratives. Leading ITS manufacturers have recognised this dynamic. Several have expanded their US production and manufacturing

BABA Compliance Timeline: Key Dates for ITS OEMs March 17, 2025 FHWA Manufactured Products Final Rule effective date. The 40-year general waiver on manufactured products is terminated. October 1, 2025 Phase 1 Final Assembly Requirement. All manufactured products permanently incorporated into federally-funded highway projects must undergo final assembly in the United States.

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capacity specifically in response to BABA requirements, opening new production facilities to support domestic assembly. Others have simply confirmed their systems already meet both Phase 1 and Phase 2 compliance thresholds. And some have even published product-by-product compliance tables showing full compliance across their entire product lines. Those types of companies are not just checking a regulatory box — they are converting compliance into a sales argument. Here is the competitive reality: the OEMs who are BABA-compliant are actively using that status in their sales conversations with agencies and integrators. The ones who are not compliant are on defence, explaining why the agency should take on the waiver risk to keep buying their product. I know which side of that conversation I would rather be on. 05. How can companies 'futureproof' their compliance against regulatory changes? Several strategies emerge as best practices for future-proofing: •

Build to Exceed, Not Just Meet the Threshold The October 2026 domestic content requirement is 55%. Companies that design and source to achieve 65-70% domestic content give themselves a buffer against future threshold increases. Regulatory trends in domestic procurement policy have consistently moved in one direction — toward stricter requirements — and there is every reason to expect that pattern to continue as the political consensus around onshoring of critical infrastructure manufacturing strengthens across party lines. © Hi-Tek Electronics

domestic sourcing on the highest-cost components — enclosures, PCB assemblies, wiring harnesses, mechanical structures — while accepting that certain commodity electronic components remain foreignsourced, provided the overall cost ratio still achieves compliance.

October 1, 2026 Phase 2 Domestic Content Requirement. In addition to US final assembly, the cost of US-mined, -produced, or -manufactured components must exceed 55% of total component cost. Ongoing ITS-specific rule: Cabinets and enclosures for ITS systems that are predominantly iron or steel must meet domestic iron and steel requirements on ALL projects regardless of obligation date.

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Invest in Component-Level Supply Chain Intelligence Maintaining real-time visibility into the domestic content percentage of your product, updated as component sourcing shifts, is the infrastructure that makes future compliance changes manageable rather than disruptive. OEMs who build this tracking capability into their productlifecycle management processes will be able to respond quickly to any future regulatory change rather than scrambling to reconstruct their BOM from scratch. Select Manufacturing Partners with Quality Management Pedigree Working with a contract electronics manufacturer who holds ISO 9001:2015, AS9100D, ITAR, and related certifications provides a compliance documentation infrastructure that is inherently audit-ready. These quality management systems require the exact kinds of traceability, process documentation, and supplier controls that BABA compliance demands. The documentation architecture is built in — you are not creating it from scratch for every project.

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Establish a Formal Compliance Review Cadence Quarterly internal reviews of domestic content calculations — updated as component costs shift, new suppliers are added, or product configurations change — are a minimum best practice. Regulatory changes also need to be monitored at the FHWA rulemaking level, including the Federal Register for proposed rules, NOPRs, and guidance updates. The companies that treat BABA compliance as a one-time project are going to find themselves back at the starting line every time the rules evolve. The ones who build compliance into their operational DNA — into their BOM

06. Ultimately, do you think everyone doing ITS business in the US will have to achieve compliance? The structural forces driving universal compliance are simply too powerful to resist indefinitely. First, the federal funding imperative: virtually all significant ITS infrastructure deployment in the US has federal-aid highway money at some layer of the financing structure. Title 23 programmes collectively touch nearly every major ITS project in the country. Opting out of BABA compliance means opting out of the projects those programmes fund. Second, the specification cascade: as agencies update their approved product lists and specifications to require BABA compliance, the requirement works its way downstream through the entire procurement ecosystem. Prime contractors bidding on federal projects cannot accept products that would create compliance risk on their grant agreements. Consultants specifying systems cannot list non-compliant products in designs that will be built with federal funds. The compliance requirement propagates through the supply chain even to OEMs who might not have direct federal contracts. Third, the political durability of the policy: the BABA requirements have bipartisan support rooted in domestic manufacturing and national security arguments that transcend normal political cycles. Infrastructure spending and American manufacturing job creation are issues that neither party is inclined to walk back, particularly as supply-chain security concerns related to foreign-made electronics in critical transportation infrastructure

continue to grow. The direction of travel is clearly toward more domestic content requirements, not fewer. The window for an organised, strategic transition to BABA compliance is open right now. The October 2025 final assembly deadline has passed, and the October 2026 55% domestic content deadline is approaching. OEMs who have not started their compliance journey are already behind the leading edge of the market. The time to act is not after losing a significant federal contract — it is before that happens. My message to any ITS OEM selling in the US market is simple: BABA compliance is not optional, it is not temporary, and it is not something you can outsource to your distribution channel to solve. It requires a genuine manufacturing relationship in the US with a qualified partner who can deliver a domestically assembled product with the documentation to prove it. Hi-Tek Electronics has been manufacturing electronic systems for the ITS industry and other critical applications in Salem, Oregon, for decades. We hold ISO 9001:2015, AS9100D, ITAR, and ISO 13485 certifications, and we have the supply chain infrastructure and quality systems to support OEMs navigating this transition. The conversation about your compliance path is one we are ready to have. ITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. John E. Shearer is CEO of Hi-Tek Electronics; his previous roles include president at Eberle Design (EDI) and various management positions at Iteris www.hitekquality.com

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management, their supplier onboarding, their quality systems, their manufacturing partnerships — are the ones who will navigate future changes without crisis.

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WEIGH-IN-MOTION

HIGH-TECH HIGH-SPEED HIGH-END SCALES

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V2X DEPLOYMENT

County lines Arizona has one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the US. Adam Hill talks to the management at Maricopa County DoT to see what Vehicle to Everything tech can do about that

Pressure on infrastructure Distinct challenges emerge from having a fast-growing population. “Rapid growth brings tremendous opportunities

for expansion, but it also intensifies the challenge of moving more people, both in vehicles and on foot, through increasingly congested corridors,” says MCDoT director Jesse Gutierrez. “Rising traffic volumes, longer commute times, and denser urban development create pressure on existing infrastructure, making it harder to keep everyone moving efficiently. Arizona has one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the nation. The more the county grows, the more travel demand for the roadways and potential safety concerns typically increase. With more pedestrians sharing space with faster-moving traffic and more vehicles

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With more pedestrians sharing space with faster-moving traffic and more vehicles competing for limited road capacity, the risk of incidents and injuries grows Jesse Gutierrez MCDoT

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olling out Vehicle to Everything (V2X) technology is high on the agenda at the US Department of Transportation (USDoT). In 2024, it handed a total of $60m to three transport agencies to explore how V2X could help them embed safer, more efficient traffic and travel. For its part, Utah DoT has created a ‘digital seatbelt’ designed to protect motorists across Colorado and Wyoming as well as Utah; while Texas A&M Transportation Institute is looking at how what it calls an ‘interim future’ - before fully-equipped connected vehicles arrive in earnest - will work (see ITS International March-April 2026 issue for both projects). The third agency in this trinity of USDoT investment - Maricopa County DoT (MCDoT) in Arizona – is using its $19.6m to introduce a Connected Vehicle Acceleration Zone (CVAZ). More of that in a moment: first of all, a word about topography and demographics. Maricopa County spans over 9,000 square miles, and ranks as the nation's fourth most populous county: with Phoenix, the fifth-largest city in the US, at its heart, the county boasts a population exceeding 4.6 million.

competing for limited road capacity, the risk of incidents and injuries grows.” Adding to these challenges, the Metro Phoenix area is a major draw for seasonal visitors and hosts large-scale events, which further strain transportation systems and amplify congestion and safety concerns. Maricopa County and its partners are therefore looking to leverage technology to better manage the changes this growth has brought to the region. Collaboration will be vital here, since the County’s jurisdiction is distinct from the local cities and towns. “That is why partnerships with the cities of Phoenix, Avondale and Tolleson and with the Arizona DoT [ADoT] are important to providing a widespread influence with connected vehicle technology,” Gutierrez continues. “The project area touches the dense urban core, suburban neighbourhoods, and rural communities that have grown together in the unique metropolitan region. By leveraging technology instead of costly construction, CVAZ maximises existing roadway capacity and sets a national model for mobility innovation.” And getting to grips with transportation connectivity is in the agency’s DNA, explains its TSMO division manager, April Wire. “Since 2008, MCDoT has been at the forefront of connected vehicle innovation through MCDoT’s SmartDrive Program,” she says. “Working in collaboration with ADoT, the University of Arizona, and the

Phoenix, Arizona

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V2X DEPLOYMENT

Maricopa county connected vehicle acceleration zone project deployment area

Maricopa county

Project area Project deployment zone

The deployment area for CVAZ includes the cities of Phoenix, Tolleson, and Avondale

Arizona Commerce Authority’s Institute of Automated Mobility, MCDoT established the 5.3-mile Anthem Test Bed.” V2X applications One of the earliest real-world environments for validating V2X communication protocols and developing V2X applications in the US, this test bed includes 11 fully-instrumented intersections equipped to support advanced applications such as emergency vehicle collision mitigation, dynamic signal priority for transit and freight, and proactive detection of pedestrians and cyclists. Since MCDoT is no newbie when it comes to V2X, how does the new CVAZ work? “The project deploys V2X technology across strategic corridors in Maricopa County,” says Joe Cottrell, the agency’s traffic technology branch manager. “CVAZ enables vehicles, infrastructure, and other road users such as pedestrians and cyclists to communicate in real time, improving situational awareness, and reducing traffic conflicts. The deployment includes equipping approximately 750 signalised intersections with V2X infrastructure and outfitting approximately 400 fleet vehicles (including emergency response, freight and transit fleets) with onboard units, facilitating direct and network-based communication systems.” CVAZ is designed to showcase critical applications such as emergency vehicle preemption, transit and freight signal priority, and vulnerable road user safety to shorten emergency response times, improve schedule adherence, minimise congestion, and better protect pedestrians and cyclists, Cottrell adds. The deployment area for CVAZ includes the cities of Phoenix, Tolleson, and Avondale, portions of unincorporated

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Maricopa County, and intersections along Grand Avenue/US 60. Wire explains that the 750 intersections were selected based on four criteria: • High transit ridership corridors • High freight traffic corridors • High levels of intersection delays • High prevalence of fatal crashes and crashes involving vulnerable road users The fact is there are a lot of people – and a lot of traffic – in the area, and both are only going to increase. “Maricopa County is known for its lively communities, dynamic business environment, and breathtaking desert landscapes,” says Gutierrez. “As a hub for innovation and economic opportunity, it combines rich cultural heritage with forward-thinking infrastructure, making it a dynamic place to live, work, and explore. Recent booms in warehousing and neighbourhood development means heavy freight traffic interacting with individuals going about daily life.” Since it doesn’t look as though the popularity of the area is going to dwindle anytime soon, the CVAZ project is timely, and hopes are high as it begins the deployment and integration phase. “Activities include first article testing, coordinating equipment installation and testing with project partners, and finalising the procurement of devices,” says Cottrell. What success looks like The project is also conducting outreach to the community by producing a project video and holding the Connected Mobility In Motion: An Interactive Showcase event as part of the first ever Arizona Commerce Authority Arizona Tech Week.

“In addition to sharing project information, the event included the opportunity to experience connected vehicle technology firsthand through an on-site demonstration and interactive STEM activities,” Cottrell continues. “First article testing included rigorous checks on the CV messaging required for operation and showed very good results. Work will continue to validate the systems and ensure the high level of accuracy required when working in transportation systems.” While it’s early days, MCDoT has very clear ideas of what a successful project will eventually look like. “Success is transforming the way Maricopa County moves - making our roads safer and improving quality of life for all - where real-time alerts and smart collision prevention stops crashes before they happen, saving lives every day,” concludes Gutierrez. “Emergency vehicles are made a priority at intersections, clearing the way so help arrives faster when it matters most. Freight trucks and buses glide through traffic with fewer delays, ensuring goods and passengers reach their destinations on time while causing less disruption to other road users. By optimising traffic flow and reducing emissions, the project succeeds not only in improving travel times but also minimising pavement wear, extending roadway life and reducing maintenance costs and delays.” ITS

CVAZ project partners • Arizona Department of Transportation • Maricopa Association of Governments • Valley Metro • City of Phoenix • City of Avondale • City of Tolleson • University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) • University of Arizona • ITS America • Arizona Trucking Association • Arizona Commerce Authority

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AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Wayve is, essentially, trying to match human ‘anywhere driving’

Horizon scan

After sitting in on multiple sessions at Intertraffic Amsterdam, Beate Kubitz rounds up some of the latest thinking on the development and deployment of AVs in Europe

elf-driving vehicle headlines are always eye-catching – and, like the vehicles themselves, they keep on coming. However, there seems to be a gap between the promised autonomous future and what will actually arrive. The reality is that autonomous vehicles (AV) have been promising the end of the driver’s licence for over a decade – but as they come closer, the nitty-gritty of real roads and uncertain laws keeps slowing the pace. Progress, however, is not even. The story of AV development is a tale of two cities – or at least two types of city. Manufacturers claiming that ‘the autonomous future is already here’ are talking about cities in the US where wide urban streets form a regular grid – a simpler environment for machines to navigate – and where city-based regulatory frameworks have licensed robotaxis in stages over time – initially testing with safety drivers and eventually removing them. This is how Waymo has launched fullyautonomous fleets in major US cities which are now being used by paying customers. In 2026, the company claims to have driven over 200 million ‘fully-autonomous’ miles, whilst serving 400,000 trips per week. The other set of cities are in Europe – where autonomous vehicle progress is more halting. For a start, the ecosystem is much more challenging. The road network is more diverse. City centres are older with some road layouts based on centuries (if not millennia) of development. They are more densely populated and overall traffic,

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pedestrians and other road users are less predictable. Plus the legal framework is still complex – unsurprising considering there are 27 countries with separate legislatures in the European Union. However, there is additional complexity at regional level – for instance the extremely devolved powers in the states of Germany mean that different permissions are granted in each state. European investment Intertraffic Amsterdam provided a broad insight into Europe’s race towards a self-driving future - although race may seem to be a slight misnomer when progress is compared to US cities. While Europe is often regarded as lagging, there are extensive resources devoted to autonomous projects. These focus on understanding and developing the frameworks in a holistic way so that AV deployment works within the European setting and, in general, in much deeper partnership with local authorities. These include the establishment of the European Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Alliance and clusters of projects funded within the Horizon Work Programme. European developments focus on shuttles and buses integrated with public transport, such as pilots of airport shuttle buses, demand-responsive vehicles connecting with mass transit or focusing on areas where driver shortages are projected in coming years. Legal framework is not settled These pilots are underway even though type approvals for vehicles are not yet fixed and permissions are not automatic. Even within

the frameworks already created there are open areas in which authorities have to interpret norms and set standards. For example, across the board, current driving laws tend to refer to people – so adaptation to autonomous vehicles must consider how to translate the actions drivers are required to take by law into driverless situations. A simple example is that many countries require that emergency triangles are deployed if a car is involved in an incident. But for AVs – which are without a driver to manually set up the triangle acceptable alternatives need to be agreed. Practical AV Other road blocks to full autonomy include practical issues from vehicle supply to vehicle management infrastructure. European pilots tend to be run in conjunction with city authorities – and, as such, AV deployment depends on city investment in resources and infrastructure. Cities need to consider where and how the vehicles will be managed, potentially designating depots or areas for software upgrades, grid connection for vehicle charging and maintenance points relating to their intensive use. Specific personnel teams (and their supporting resources) for recovery, maintenance, charging and other requirements are also a consideration. This points to the fact that cities don’t typically have staff working on the topic with necessary knowledge or specialised expertise. Meanwhile, politicians tend to be conservative about the capabilities of the vehicles and their technological readiness so are unwilling to devote resources to it.

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AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Case study: Brussels Two highly-automated shuttles were launched to connect Heverlee and Leuven Station. The service was integrated into public transport lines and visible on the public transport map. Technology partner WeRide was at the time the only provider able to supply a bigger vehicle that could navigate complex city geometry. The route took on a very busy city corridor with cyclists and pedestrians and the highest number of buses in the region. It showed that one of the difficulties is to get the vehicle to move forward safely in complex and busy environments (such as a surge of students coming out of lessons). The challenge was to teach it to advance at all. The initiative was developed and coordinated by Espaces-Mobilités, which led the procurement process, regulatory approvals, safety assessments and training activities. ROI or other reasons? The pathway for cooperative, connected and automated mobility (CCAM) to foster growth is not highly visible and there is scepticism about the economic impact of autonomous driving in Europe. An analysis by AV shuttle provider Holon indicated that return on investment is only indicated at scale in fleets of over 100 vehicles per operator. However, other factors such as driver shortages and ageing populations must also be considered and are often cited by authorities piloting AV projects. Despite obstacles in the road, there is still a general expectation that we will see significant numbers of robotaxis in a few select cities (Oslo, Hamburg and London) in the next year, with contributions to public transport following in two to three years and trucking three to five years from now. Case Study: Oslo Ruter, the public transport authority for Oslo, announced a tender for 500 AVs this year. This is the culmination of cautious trialling and testing – with the philosophy that it is very difficult to roll back and make

Expecting that services will be ‘plug and play’ - rather than requiring extensive set-up - is one problem, as is underestimating the costs of setting up the system and the personnel required for project management, documentation and risk assessment.

Holon’s autonomous shuttles are operating on the streets of Hamburg

the ‘right ‘decisions once the development is underway. The authority invested in AV trials for seven years, using Moia and MobilEye Drive to create services that mesh with public transport. Their partner Holon noted the key difference between scaling with a public sector client and private companies putting vehicles on roads is that the public sector has a much longer-term view. However, that process establishes shared AVs as an integrated part of public transport, complementing fixed-line services, walking and cycling. There are questions over public investment in AVs in a world where Uber, Waymo et al are putting vast fortunes into creating autonomous services. These questions need to be considered in view of Europe’s cities – which are dense ecosystems with constrained space on their roads. Understanding how to regulate this new technology for social and environmental benefit cannot develop in a vacuum. By being core to the testing and deployment, and by investing themselves, local authorities get to set the rules. Once they have set up (whether directly or in collaboration with manufacturers) services, they provide the benchmark against which other providers of AVs seeking access to their roads can be judged. It means that it will be harder for private sector monopolies to form – and easier for society to push back

against adverse consequences. This is a key benefit in Europe’s tight and complex road networks, where public transport is highly valued for its ability to minimise the space required to move huge numbers of people to and from work, education and leisure. It also enables cities to ensure equality and access to opportunity and evaluate the carbon footprint of transport. Case study: Wayve ‘scaling embodied AI’ The public transport-focused trials on limited routes and highly-mapped zones are not the only approach within Europe. Wayve is, essentially, trying to match human ‘anywhere driving’ with its fleet of modified test vehicles in which supervised AI models are dealing with real-world variability. The initial models were trained on London data and then taken on a 500-city road trip to test how the AI ‘driver’ generalises to new unseen places. This structured testing exposes just how different and unique each country is (and how localised some of the regulation of AVs can be) – whilst also enabling insight into how well the model coped to learn to identify different styles of signs and road furniture from traffic lights and crossings to yield and stop signs. AVs are coming to European roads – but by being active participants in their development, cities and regions are setting the standards by which any other entrant will have to abide. ITS

Moia’s AVs have been used to mesh with public transport services

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ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

ENFORCEMENT

Space jam East Africa's projected increase in urbanisation means the number of vehicles on the region’s roads is expected to increase: but where will they all park, and how will they pay, asks Shem Oirere

Revenue leakage For instance, in the last three years the county government of Nairobi City has changed its parking payment plans several times, citing inefficiency, theft and losses that have constrained the ability of the local authority to realise its full revenue potential from the 16,000 parking spaces across the city. Currently, motorists in Nairobi pay for parking using a USSD code, Nairobi Pay, an e-services portal created by Nairobi

Central Nairobi: lots of parking

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

City County government to ease service provision and payment for county government services. "Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala have instituted some parking reforms, including the adoption of IT-based fee payment through mobile money systems,” explains Christopher Kost, an ITS expert and former Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Africa director. “However, parking enforcement is typically left to the discretion of parking attendants, resulting in revenue leakage and unauthorised parking." The Tanzania Rural and Urban Roads Agency (Tarura), a government agency that controls parking services in Dar es Salaam and other local urban areas, introduced electronic parking fee payments in February 2025. Tarura introduced Tausi, which is part of the Tanzania government electronic payment platform, through which one can digitally obtain business licences, pay service levies, apply for building permits, purchase plots, and settle parking fees, among other services - including reserved parking that allows motorists to book in advance. The system also enables motorists to register for roaming parking services and pay based on the duration they are planning to use the service without any prior booking.

There is also a subscription parking service with the option to pay parking fees hourly or daily. Parking encroachments Tausi was preceded by e-Revenue Information Management System (TeRMIS), also an initiative of Tarura. The payment system was discontinued after motorists protested its inefficiency, forcing a return to the manual collection system. Meanwhile, in Uganda's capital, Kampala, public-partnerships on parking revenues seem to be the preferred model by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), the governing body. Kost says authorites in these cities should "move toward IT-based enforcement, in which enforcement officers scan the licence plates of all parked vehicles, and parking systems issue fines automatically for vehicles that are parked without payment of the corresponding fee”. Kost says it is time authorities addressed the problem of "widespread parking encroachments” on footpaths and cyclepaths: "Illegally parked vehicles force pedestrians and cyclists into the carriageway, resulting in accessibility challenges and safety risks.” He cites the example of Nairobi, where "many streets in the city centre have double and even triple parking—space that could

uthorities in East Africa's leading cities - Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kampala (Uganda) – have deployed various parking management strategies. But despite both public and private participation, parking revenue control remains a major challenge characterised by weak enforcement and slow-paced modernisation of parking infrastructure and services. From experimenting with diverse electronic payment plans to manual ticketing, the three cities are yet to embrace a parking revenue system that assures them of adequate income to efficiently operate and manage their parking operations as well as generate adequate funding for other parking infrastructure projects.

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ENFORCEMENT

Anticipated growth "Cities and urban development ministries also need to work to reform zoning policies and building control regulations to eliminate off-street parking requirements, particularly in areas with good public transport access, following the example of successful parking reform efforts in cities such as Mexico City, São Paulo, Auckland, Berlin, and San Francisco." Control and management of parking revenue in some cities in East Africa have, for decades, faced legal hurdles, especially when it comes to adjusting the rates upwards, with automobile and consumer

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be reallocated for pedestrian movement, cycling, and public space”. Kost suggests parking in major cities should be leveraged in the management of traffic and reduction of congestion although he notes "most cities in the East Africa region view parking as a means of revenue generation”. The cities should also institute demandbased pricing, with increased rates on blocks with higher demand, noting that, in East Africa, on-street parking is typically priced lower than off-street parking. "Given that on-street parking is more desirable than off-street parking, especially for short-term users, it should have a higher fee," he adds.

Traffic in Kampala

groups challenging such price changes in court. For example, in June last year, Nairobi City County government withdrew price changes affecting parking services in the city; its attempt to streamline parking fees payment and create clarity in categorisation of parking zones and fee categories was declared illegal by the High Court of Kenya. But with East Africa's projected increase in

urbanisation and population growth, and an anticipated growth of the region's economy, the number of vehicles on the cities' roads is expected to increase. So will the demand for efficient parking solutions - even as public-private partnerships grow to invest in the selection, design and deployment of smart parking systems and technology to manage traffic and reduce congestion. ITS

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

REMOTE CONTROL The City of Tampere has launched Finland’s first commercially-operated automated shuttle service: Kevin Borras talks to the people responsible for steering this driverless solution

he very definition of “lastmile” mobility is helping to connect people in a remote community in south-east Finland with essential

transport links. In the depths of winter, the 1,000 or so residents of Lintuhytti (pronounced as it’s spelled, Linn-too-hitty), a residential area of Tampere in Finland, can very often become cut off from local transport links. Despite the nearest tram stop being no more than a couple of kilometres away, adults struggle to work and children aren’t able to get to school. So what are your transport options? Or more pertinently, what are your options for getting to transport? In November last year, the partners of the MetaCCAZE project - the City of Tampere (a recent addition to the ITS Hall of Fame), Remoted Oy and Tampere University - launched Finland’s first commercially-operated automated shuttle bus route. The service, provided by Tampere’s regional public transport authority Nysse, consists of a 12-seater Ohmio Lift electric driverless shuttle, laden with the very latest in advanced Lidar and camera systems. Operating as Line 301, three times per hour

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

between Lintuhytti and the Hervantajärvi tram stop, this is thought to be the first such commercial automated bus line in the entire Nordic region. Tampere is Finland’s third-largest city, with a population of approximately 250,000. Connections between the centre and the suburbs are provided by buses, along with a cycling network and tram lines that began operating in 2021. Adversity challenge The city’s challenge, in line with its Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), is to boost the public transport modal share from 13% to 21% and reduce the car modal share from 43% to 30% by 2030. The broader goal is to establish competitive alternatives to private cars, ultimately aiming to reduce car ownership. The advent of a commercial, autonomous shuttle service certainly ticks more than a few SUMP boxes. The Ohmio Lift vehicle runs daily, using the standard fare system. Service hours are 06:00-23:00 on weekdays and approximately 09:00-22:00 on weekends. The aim is for the service to transition to fullydriverless operation, monitored remotely by Remoted Oy from the aforementioned

dedicated control centre. Additional Lidar and camera systems will enable Level 4 automation, allowing remote control and true autonomous driving without human intervention. The vehicle also features advanced battery technology designed for harsh Finnish winters. The testing phase will run until November this year, with the option to extend for a further two years. Alongside technical evaluation, the project will assess economic viability and public acceptance. It is planned that three additional automated vehicles will join the fleet. With any project that features multiple players, how the collaboration came to fruition is always a source of interest. In the case of the Lintuhytti shuttles it was a case of identifying goals, how they could be achieved and who could help to achieve them. A meeting of autonomous minds So what did it take, administratively at least, to get this project approved and off the ground? Mika Periviita, Tampere’s director of public transport, explains. “Remoted is a start-up company from Tampere and has already been involved in several autonomous traffic pilots here,” he www.itsinternational.com - get your intelligent mobility fix

Stay connected It's clearly important for both the city and region to ensure that remote communities feel connected rather than isolated. And what about knowledge transfer? This project may be specific to Lintuhytti, but are other remote cities in Finland and beyond showing interest in deploying a similar solution tailored to their own requirements?

“

The key objective of the project is to demonstrate the functionality of robot car traffic as a public transport service

“

Mika Periviita City of Tampere

The Ohmio Lift vehicle runs daily

“Firstly, the Lintuhytti area is about feeder traffic to trunk traffic, i.e. tram traffic,” says Periviita. “With the help of autonomous vehicles, areas such as Lintuhytti can get better services for the same amount of money. The project has aroused interest and certainly also increased interest in similar experiments in other cities. The use of autonomous transport in public transport is a new thing, and more information about the development is needed everywhere. At the moment, the key question is how quickly these experiments can be turned into more permanent production and how these services can be put out to tender in a sensible way.” Mobility as a commercial service For Mika Rytkonen, chairman and chief business officer at Remoted, the project represented far more than a Europe-wide validation of autonomous shuttle technology and its myriad use cases. “We wanted to go beyond that,” Rytkonen says. “We wanted to validate the commercialisation

and viability for commercial operations, saying that our autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial operations. What is needed in addition to the vehicle in order to provide some kind of mobility service under commercial terms? In order to undertake a commercial operation, you need additional technologies.” A viable use case is also needed – and this is where the community of Lintuhytti, roughly 2km from mass transit, comes in. “How do we connect this Lintuhytti district with the tram line?” Rytkonen continues. “The best way is to use an autonomous robot bus which is going back and forth for some of the day, feeding people into highcapacity public transport. So we had a very clear mobility challenge to solve. And then we also wanted to do that under commercial terms, meaning what else is needed, other than a vehicle? You need ticketing machines, you need a remote-control centre, you need two-way communication, you need extra help for passengers, and so on, and so forth. And don’t forget that we chose the toughest time of the year in Finland - winter.”

says. “Tampere, on the other hand, has profiled itself as a pilot area for autonomous transport in Finland, and therefore the cooperation has been natural. It was Remoted who made a proposal for a project. The city wants to prepare for autonomous traffic in the future and collects data for the purpose of competitive tendering for transport.” Since its launch, the service has maintained a high reliability rate, recently surpassing the milestone of 5,000 passengers. “The City of Tampere is preparing for the utilisation of autonomous transport in tram feeder traffic,” Periviita adds. “The key objective of the project is to demonstrate the functionality of robot car traffic as a public transport service and to assess the possibilities of robot bus traffic from an economic point of view at the moment. Remoted operates one vehicle with a high level of automation (SAE Level 4). The project includes three years of operation and costs a total of €430,000. The operating compensation includes approximately 110 hours of traffic per week.”

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Ohmio Lift shuttle at the tram stop

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ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Young Lintuhytti resident aboard the shuttle

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

we are talking about sustainability. Because sustainability means also that our generation will not use all the raw materials. We are balancing our demand without sacrificing the demands of the future generations.” Tried and tested For Joost Ortjens, director of EMEA and corporate development at autonomous electric vehicle specialist Ohmio, what made the Remoted project ‘super interesting’ was Finland’s position as arguably the most innovative country in Europe.

“I’d always asked myself, what are they doing in Finland that is so different?” Ortjens says. “I still can't give you a definitive answer on that, but I recognise from the Remoted team that they are very open to trying and trialling new things. It’s also the speed at which they say, ‘We tried it, we tested it, we’re happy with it’ that is so much different from other countries’ approaches.” Even though medium-sized towns in Finland are typically quite well-connected to the local public transport system by train or tram or bus lines, the smaller, more remote

“

We had a very clear mobility challenge to solve… And don’t forget that we chose the toughest time of the year in Finland - winter

Mika Rytkonen Remoted

“

To date, the project partners have been able to provide 100% reliability every week - even in temperatures as low as -26C. The community is evidently ready for using driverless shuttles to ferry various generations to and from the tram stop that is their gateway to Tampere and beyond. As the avuncular Rytkonen says: “It's a beautiful thing.” What is less of a beautiful thing is that Europe is currently in the midst of what could become a crippling shortage of drivers. In April, Swedish electric autonomous truck pioneers Einride told an Intertraffic Amsterdam Summit audience that Europe is short of three quarters of a million qualified truck drivers. And when you add that to 100,000+ “missing” bus drivers, it makes you wonder how on earth anything or anyone moves anywhere. The shortage generates two inextricably linked questions: do you train people to become truck or bus drivers… or do you develop trucks and buses that don’t need drivers? “In Europe, the bus driver shortage is expected to be three times greater in the next few years because of retirement and because people just don’t apply for these kinds of jobs,” says Rytkonen. “So we are more or less filling the gap. In Finland, if you're talking about emissions, in addition to CO2 and NOx, private cars are emitting 10,000 tonnes of microplastics from the wheels because you have to remember that electric cars are heavier. If we are talking about sustainable urban mobility, it has to be shared, electric, and autonomous - and all of those things at the same time. When we implement something like that, then

www.itsinternational.com - get your intelligent mobility fix

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

“

I’d always asked myself, what are they doing in Finland that is so different? I still can't give you a definitive answer on that, but … they are very open to trying and trialling new things

Joost Ortjens Ohmio

“

villages are not. And that is a problem which Ohmio is only too happy to play a part in solving. “These villages don't have the transportation capacity to open a new bus line and connect the village to the town because they don’t create the demand in terms of volume,” explains Ortjens. “So if you have a shuttle and you need a driver, the likelihood is that the shuttle would be in use a few hours a day for a few passengers. I think that's the benefit of autonomous vehicles in general, not specifically ours.” The demand may be low-volume and even irregular, and for several hours a day the driverless shuttles can be idle, but the combination of the related cost benefits and Finland’s predilection for innovative solution means that Ohmio, Remoted and the City of Tampere have formed something of a formidable partnership. One element that has to be taken into consideration in the Nordic countries - perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe - is an autonomous vehicle’s ability to perform in all weather conditions. This, it’s no surprise to discover, is something that the project partners addressed as an early priority “It's a good point because we like to think that we have a competitive edge in terms of our products working in all weathers,” answers Luxembourg-based Ortjens. “What I understood from Remoted is that we did a number of tests in really heavy snow, and we did quite well and our competitors didn't. What’s interesting here is that every snowflake that is seen by the radars and Lidar is processed individually. Lidar is very precise. So what the Lidar is

seeing is a lot of dots, and it doesn't know, per definition, whether that is something harmful. To the vehicle, heavy snowfall can look like a wall because all those flakes reflect the light. And now you need to teach the software to deal with it by reconstructing what it is seeing between the flakes - to reconstruct that as a reliable picture and basically ignore all the dots.” So are we talking here about snowflakes as individual pieces of data? “It may be better to think of it as if you wear glasses and you place a little sticker

on one of the lenses, obviously you cannot see through the sticker but you would still understand what's happening around you, because your brain reconstructs the picture behind the dot,” Ortjens concludes. “You know what's happening in the field that you can't see. And that is how you reconstruct the real world behind all those snowflakes.” So autonomous vehicles are helping the residents of Lintuhytti get from… not A to B exactly - but at least to get to A, to enable them to get to B, one snowflake at a time. ITS

The shuttle links with tram services

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VISION TECHNOLOGY

Eyes on every mile A vision-language platform turns existing CCTV into a continuous incident sensor: Ray Leiva and Hal Worrall explain why agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are paying attention

ESU: “Visual Enabled Scene Understanding” reads every camera continuously, writes incidents in plain English, and lets the agency rewrite the prompt to fit its own concerns.

01 The under-used sensor For 30 years, the camera has been the most under-used sensor on the highway. Agencies own hundreds of thousands of them on gantries, in tunnels, at ramps, on poles, and almost all are used the same way: a person in a control room turns to look when something else, usually a phone call or a loop detector, says something is wrong. The cameras themselves do not raise their hands. They watch. The cost of that gap is measurable. In Florida alone, more than 362,000 crashes in 2025 produced 235,964 injuries and 2,849 fatalities; nationally, more than 39,000 lives were lost on US highways in 2024. The 288 US traffic management centres, and thousands more worldwide, oversee nearly half a million cameras between them. How to make those cameras work harder is a ITS International: supporting the ITS industry since 1995

If every camera could see for itself, it stops being a window and starts being a sensor; one you can scale, audit, and tune to your own concerns

for revenue-grade demands where every transaction has to stand up to audit. What changed over the past 12 months is where that platform points. The same toolkit that recognises vehicles and reasons over time can be turned outward, away from the gantry and onto the road. The result is VESU, brought to market in 2026. Presented at May’s IBTTA Technology Summit in Orlando, Florida, the platform met a reception that was, by the team’s own account, beyond what had been anticipated. What has followed has been less about the technology and more about each agency shaping it to its own use cases: Maintenance of Traffic (MOT) plan conformance for some, wrong-way detection for others, real-time speed and queue measurement, weather-impact analysis, monitoring operations inside construction zones.

02 A tolling-AI platform, redirected Tollscopic, the team behind VESU, built a native AI/ML platform for open-road tolling; an end-to-end pipeline for plate read, vehicle classification and transaction reconciliation, with audit-grade provenance. It has been quietly running on US toll roads for several years, designed

03 Right model, right question To bring a new camera into VESU, an agency provides three things: a camera identifier, a feed URI, and a coordinate pair. No on-site survey, no calibration target, no edge appliance. Within minutes the platform begins its one-time, sceneunderstanding pass.

question the industry has been asking for a generation. Computer-vision approaches have failed for decades on the same problems: calibration that does not scale, fairweather-only performance, false positives operators learn to ignore. Vision-language models open a different class of safety system; the hard part is making it work at fleet scale without the per-frame cost of asking a large model everything. VESU was engineered around that constraint. What the agency gets is a new kind of safety sensor, one whose output is a video clip, a written explanation, and an audit trail of how the call was made.

VISION TECHNOLOGY

Right model, right question — orders of magnitude more cost-efficient and faster than asking one big model everything Three consequences follow. Cost scales with cameras rather than frames, because the geometric ground truth is built once

“

A platform built for tolling has found a second life in safety, and what an agency can do today with the cameras it already owns is more than it used to think

“

The naive approach would be to send every frame to a strong vision-language model and ask it everything: where the lanes are, where the shoulder is, which way traffic moves. That route scales linearly with frames, balloons with the fleet, and is silently wrong on the geometry VLMs are weakest at, like locating a gore line in pixels. VESU composes specialty models instead. A segmentation model produces pixel-precise region masks; a lane-detection model produces sub-pixel lane lines; optical flow yields per-region motion histograms of which way traffic actually flows. Only then is a vision-language model invoked, with four to six semantic questions per camera: “Which mask is the roadway?”; “What corridor class is this?”; the things VLMs are reliably good at.

and reused indefinitely, which is why an agency contracting for 10 cameras pays roughly the same per-camera cost as one contracting for hundreds. Geometric accuracy is sub-pixel where it matters. And the failure mode is loud, not silent: when something is off, the pipeline disagrees with itself rather than confidently guessing. 04 How it works: the cascade, in plain English With the substrate in place, runtime detection runs as a four-stage cascade: light, frequent checks at the front; strong models reserved for the small fraction of evidence that justifies them. Cost rises through the cascade; frequency falls.

Stage 0 · Camera health A quick, deterministic check on every frame: is the camera frozen, fogged, mis-aimed, exposure usable? A blind camera, the engineers note, is worse than a quiet one. Loss-of-coverage is filed as a maintenance event in its own right, routed to the maintenance queue, not the operator queue. Silence is not safety. Stage 1 · Frame perception Every X seconds, each camera’s most recent frame is sent to a light visionlanguage model with a prompt tuned to agency priorities: stopped vehicles, debris, pedestrians in live lanes, smoke, wrong-way movement, workzone activity, weather. The model returns structured JSON with hypotheses and a confidence score. It is deliberately not asked to decide. Stage 2 · Temporal reasoning The decision happens here. The system reasons over a rolling X-second window using rules and a language model, asking not how confident the perception model is now but whether the hypothesis has

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VISION TECHNOLOGY persisted across enough frames, in the same region, with the camera healthy throughout. Most flags die here. A single false ping is forgivable; a steady drip is not. Stage 3 · Verify and publish Roughly 1% of windows survive into Stage 3. A six-second clip is pulled from the segment store and handed to a stronger multimodal model with a sharper question: “Is this vehicle in a live lane or on the shoulder?” If confirmed, an incident package is emitted — the clip, a plain-English reason, and a provenance trail of every stage decision. End-to-end latency from first symptom to a published P0 alert is well under a minute. 05 In the operator’s seat The operator does not see this through a separate console. VESU emits incidents over a webhook or message bus - no parallel video wall, no second login, no new training. An alert is a row in the dashboard the operator already has. Click it, the clip plays, and the rationale is already written. That last point matters more than it sounds. A traditional CV alarm tells the operator something is wrong; the operator must open the camera, find the segment, and judge for themselves. A vision-language alert says: a tow-truck is stationary on the right shoulder of SR-417 northbound near MM 8.2, traffic is flowing, an occupant is visible, severity medium. The operator is reviewing a draft, not writing one from scratch.

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06 The agency’s prompt Every safety case VESU watches for is encoded as a prompt the agency can read, edit and version. A new concern? Rewrite the prompt; the same cascade watches for it. No retraining, no on-site visit, no model release. Mid-construction example: a state DoT broadens its pedestrian-in-live-lane definition to include the cone taper, adds a flagger-displacement case, and is live across the segment in minutes, with an audit log of who changed what, when, and why. The prompt is the product. Categories, geofences, severity thresholds, alert wording, none of it is hard-coded. One platform, many prompts… The same mechanism lets agencies operate in their own language, with their own legal definitions of an incident. A platform that adapts to the agency, not the other way around. 07 From the field The Central Florida Expressway Authority, operating roughly 125 miles of toll roads around Orlando, is among the first to run VESU at scale. A snapshot from May 2026 shows the breadth: stopped-vehicle events on the shoulder, workzone activity, a state patrol assisting a stopped motorist, a weather event on SR-417 logged as a coverage advisory rather than an incident. Most diagnostic, perhaps, was the day a CFX camera on SR-528 panned away from the highway and ended up fixed on a treeline.

A traditional CV system would have gone silent. VESU filed an incident on itself and routed it to maintenance. Loss of coverage is not the absence of an incident. It is the incident. Inbound conversations since the IBTTA presentation have followed a similar pattern: US state authorities in active pilot discussions, international operators scoping enquiries. The questions are consistent: how quickly it runs on a subset of the existing fleet, how it integrates with the ATMS, how much of the prompt is theirs to control. Days, transparently, all of it. 08 What it means for ITS The implication is straightforward. The cameras which agencies already own are the largest distributed sensor network on the highway. The job over the next five years is to teach them to file the reports the control rooms have always wished they could. A platform built for tolling has found a second life in safety, and what an agency can do today with the cameras it already owns is more than it used to think. ITS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Ray Leiva (left) is president of Tollscopic, and Hal Worrall is president at Transportation Innovations

MASS TRANSIT

AND THEN COMES THE NIGHT

Humanist technologist Mehri Mohebbi explains why nighttime mobility is a critical ITS test

y story with nighttime mobility began years ago, with a quiet sense of amazement at how Madrid functioned while I was visiting in my twenties. I wasn’t thinking about transport systems or governance at the time. I was simply moving through the city late at night and noticing something that felt unusual. The city did not thin out or fall apart after midnight. It stayed legible, connected, and calm. Only later did I realise that what I was experiencing was not nightlife, but infrastructure working under constraint. In hindsight, that experience reflected something deeper: urban abundance is not measured by spectacle, but by whether essential systems remain accessible when conditions tighten. Near dawn one morning, I walked to a night bus stop expecting confusion or emptiness. Instead, there was light, a clear schedule, other riders, and a bus that arrived quietly and on time. It carried people home across the city without drama, from Retiro to San Sebastian de los Reyes. Years later, working in transportation systems, I

came to understand that experience as a revealing lesson: cities show their true priorities after dark. Nighttime as a Systems Stress Test Cities do not stop functioning after midnight, but many transport systems still plan as if they do. After dark, operating conditions change in ways that are both predictable and unforgiving. Service frequency drops. Staffing thins. Visibility decreases. The margin for error narrows. For ITS, nighttime mobility is not a marginal concern tied only to nightlife or special events. It is one of the clearest stress tests of system resilience and institutional readiness. Under nighttime conditions, the assumptions that hold systems together during peak hours are stripped away. Technology must work with fewer buffers, fewer people, and less tolerance for failure. Historically, nighttime transport has been treated as an extension of daytime service. Late buses are added reactively. Schedules are stretched. And performance is assessed based on daytime averages. This approach underestimates how different nighttime conditions truly are.

Demand does not disappear after dark. It shifts, often toward populations with the least flexibility and the fewest alternatives. Urban abundance, in this sense, is not about having more infrastructure. It is about ensuring that access does not shrink when vulnerability increases. Night-shift workers, service employees, healthcare staff, students, and unhoused populations depend on mobility precisely when systems are least buffered. For ITS professionals, nighttime operations reduce systems to their essentials. Real-time tools are only as effective as the people monitoring them. Automation depends on staffing alignment. Incident response hinges on clear authority. When these elements are weak, intelligence becomes performative rather than functional. What Leading Cities Do Differently After Dark Several global cities have moved beyond ad hoc nighttime service by formally recognising night mobility as a public good rather than an operational exception. While their institutional models differ, consistent patterns emerge.

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MASS TRANSIT

What Nighttime Mobility Requires from ITS When systems move from daytime to nighttime conditions, the challenge is not simply reduced demand. It is reduced tolerance for failure. Fewer staff, fewer options, and thinner redundancy mean that small Follow us on LinkedIn

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design or governance gaps have outsized consequences. For ITS professionals and policymakers, improving nighttime mobility is less about adding new technology and more about aligning existing systems around predictability, access and trust. Based on observed practice across cities that perform well after midnight, several operational principles stand out. What this looks like in practice for ITS professionals When nighttime mobility works well, it is rarely because a city deployed a new piece of technology. It is usually because existing systems were aligned to function under thinner margins. From observing cities that perform consistently after midnight, a few practical patterns emerge. First, predictability matters more than frequency at night. Riders are far less concerned with shaving a few minutes off a headway than they are with knowing a service will actually arrive. Legible routes, stable schedules, and accurate information reduce anxiety and shape behaviour more than marginal increases in service intensity. ITS tools are most useful here when they surface missed trips and broken connections, not just throughput. Second, nighttime performance needs to be examined on its own terms. When late-night data is averaged into daytime conditions, fragility disappears from view.

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Cities do not stop functioning after midnight, but many transport systems still plan as if they do

Cancellations, response delays, safety incidents, and rider complaints after midnight tell a very different story than daytime dashboards. Cities that separate and regularly review nighttime performance tend to fix problems earlier, because they can finally see them. In many cases, the tools already exist; what’s missing is a habit of examining nighttime conditions directly. Third, technology only performs as well as the workforce model behind it. Advanced scheduling and real-time management systems break down when dispatch coverage, field supervision, or maintenance staffing quietly drop overnight. Successful cities design their overnight staffing and authority structures deliberately, then deploy technology to support those realities rather than assume daytime conditions extend into the night. Safety follows a similar logic. After dark, safety is experienced as a system, not a statistic. Lighting levels, stop design, response visibility, and communication all shape whether a space feels usable. ITS investments that connect asset monitoring, lighting management, and incident response tend to improve perceived safety without relying solely on enforcement. Data also behaves differently at night. Late-night travel rarely follows inherited assumptions. Cities that rely on exploratory tools, including open-source platforms are often surprised by what they see: unexpected origins, non-commute patterns, and informal transfer points. The value of these tools is not precision, but learning. Governance, however, is often the quiet differentiator. Many nighttime failures are not technical; they are decision failures. © Yocamon | Dreamstime.com

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In Madrid, nighttime mobility is anchored by the Búhos night-bus network, which operates every night once metro services wind down. Routes radiate from central hubs to peripheral districts, allowing riders to navigate the city predictably after midnight. What distinguishes the system is not just coverage, but coordination. Night buses are aligned with lighting strategies, emergency response, and social outreach, creating coherence across departments rather than isolated transport provision. Barcelona approaches nighttime mobility through its NitBus network. This Catalan city maintains metropolitan-scale access when rail services are limited. Routes support residential and employment areas, not only entertainment districts. Night transit is treated as part of public-space management. All of those services are integrated with pedestrian-oriented street design and event-based service adjustments. In Seoul, the Night Owl bus system illustrates how data can support nighttime planning without over-promising automation. Using anonymised mobile-phone and calldata records, the city mapped where people actually travel after midnight. Routes and frequencies are adjusted based on observed behaviour rather than daytime assumptions. This approach allows service to evolve as patterns change. Melbourne’s Night Network is another global example, which provides 24-hour weekend service across trains, trams and buses, explicitly designed to support both nightlife and shift workers. The network is paired with a nighttime-economy governance structure that enables coordination across transport, safety, and social services beyond office hours. Amsterdam complements night metro and bus services with cycling infrastructure and a Night Mayor governance model. This structure aligns nighttime mobility decisions with public health, cultural activity, and harmreduction strategies, ensuring transport is not planned in isolation from broader nighttime conditions. Across these cities, the difference is not whether night services exist. Many cities operate late buses. The difference lies in whether nighttime services are treated as systems: governed deliberately, staffed appropriately, and adapted based on what actually happens after midnight. They treat nighttime mobility as a condition of urban abundance rather than an exception to daytime normalcy.

Seoul’s Night Owl bus system illustrates how data can support nighttime planning without over-promising automation

MASS TRANSIT management, nighttime conditions remain the most honest proving ground for intelligent transport systems. Reduced staffing and thinner redundancy reveal whether systems are resilient or merely optimised for ideal conditions. Improving nighttime mobility requires clearer alignment between data, operations, and governance, and a willingness to treat the night as core infrastructure rather than an exception. Cities that do this well tend to build transport systems that perform better at all hours. In practical terms, urban abundance depends on transportation systems that preserve access across time, not just across space. Intelligent systems that function reliably after midnight strengthen the economic, social, and institutional fabric of the city as a whole. ITS

Madrid ‘did not thin out or fall apart after midnight: it stayed legible, connected, and calm’

When authority becomes unclear after office hours, escalation slows and accountability fragments. Cities that clarify who decides, who responds, and who coordinates after midnight tend to resolve issues faster, even with the same technology. Finally, those who experience the city most intensely at night should shape how systems are designed. Night-shift workers, service employees, women, gender

minorities, and unhoused populations encounter the transport system under its most constrained conditions. Designing for them improves access and predictability for everyone else. Ignoring them leaves blind spots no algorithm can correct. Why this matters now As cities invest more heavily in automation, real-time analytics, and AI-enabled

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mehri Mohebbi works at the intersection of transportation systems, data and governance; she writes bimonthly on the Gentle AI newsletter on intelligent systems and well-being

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AI IN TRANSPORTATION

Shining a light on Honky Tonk Highway Music City is now playing a different tune by utilising Lidar to improve road safety in its dense urban environment. Alan Dron reports from the country music capital of the world…

t’s one of the busiest streets in the US. Residents, tourists, taxis, buses and private cars jostle for position on Nashville’s Broadway, aka Honky Tonk Highway. In the country music capital of the world, myriad bars, music and retail establishments, and residential blocks generate huge volumes of both vehicle and pedestrian traffic. The stretch of road is projected to draw an astounding 17.3 million tourists this year. The bustling five-block stretch also presents one of the city’s biggest transportation management challenges: persistent congestion, complex pedestrian safety concerns, and the need for frequent, precisely-managed road closures. The city also has to get buses through the area, while Ubers and Lyfts are constantly stopping to pick up rides. All this can lead to collisions involving vulnerable road users, as well as delays to the city’s public transport fleet. As always, fixing a problem means initially measuring it - which is where a steadily expanding network of Lidar systems throughout Nashville is being put to work. This is not the first time Tennessee has turned to Lidar; the city of Chattanooga opted for the Ouster BlueCity traffic management solution, which combines 3D digital Lidar and proprietary AI, when it Follow us on LinkedIn

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began a project to evaluate pedestrian road safety (see ITS International, JanuaryFebruary 2025 issue). Real-time mapping Lidar uses optical lasers to produce real-time mapping of an area, using the light beams as their ‘radar’ to create a ‘point cloud’ of millions of data points that create a virtual image of the area at which they are pointed. Lasers have an advantage over video systems, in that they are unaffected by darkness or poor weather conditions, providing real-time images, 24/7. Chattanooga initially equipped 13 intersections with the Ouster BlueCity intersection solution, later expanding that 10-fold, covering the downtown area and beyond. Nashville’s Lidar journey with the Ouster solution began with a pilot scheme at around eight locations in North Nashville for safety use cases, before expanding to downtown Broadway for traffic management and crowd safety, then growing to its latest stage – covering 100-plus intersection and roadway deployments – for enhanced signal optimisations and analytics. Dr Will Barbour, senior research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, and adjunct professor at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University, said that the pilot

kicked off in late 2023/early 2024 with the formation of his project team and coordination with Ouster on Lidar specifications. Things moved quickly: in the second quarter of 2024, the first Lidar system arrived and an initial installation was deployed at the intersection of 26th Avenue N and Clarksville Pike. Installing the Lidar sensors and their associated equipment in a roadside traffic cabinet took less than four hours (now typically reduced to two hours for later installations) and within 48 hours the Lidargenerated data began to confirm concerns about mid-block crossings – notably between two apartment blocks on one side of the road and a convenience store on the other. Eliminating blind spots A standard Lidar installation involves mounting two sensors at each intersection on vertical poles around 13-15 feet to eliminate any blind spots. In the latter part of 2024, mobile trailers with Lidar sensors were added, giving coverage for temporary data-collection efforts as needed. Lidar sensors are installed on existing traffic poles, mostly eliminating the need for mast arms, trenching, and lane closures while removing the burden of complex calibration, frequent cleaning, and field service dispatches, undercutting traditional detection systems. ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

AI IN TRANSPORTATION

Lidar illuminates Music City Nashville has steadily expanded its Lidar coverage over the past two years:

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An initial pilot scheme saw the devices placed at eight intersections and mid-blocks for safety use cases like near-miss detection and jaywalking That was followed by an expansion on downtown Broadway for corridor-level traffic management and crowd safety

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“The detection system we’re using from Ouster is not just for road safety but other transport purposes,” Barbour explains. The system offers considerably more than just safety insights, namely dynamic traffic actuation, traffic management and rapid-turnround of live road-user data. One particular area of interest to Barbour’s team was not just crash statistics, but data on near-misses, to quantify risks to pedestrians and other vulnerable road users. Near-misses are big indicators of safety problems - but collecting data on them can be timeconsuming and expensive. “Crashes are rare events; waiting for a crash to happen to a statistically-relevant point is a patient – and possibly morbid! – process,” Barbour notes. “I would say the long-term stats are not the primary focus; we’re really focused on trying to identify

Lidar deployment began with a pilot scheme at around eight locations in North Nashville for safety use cases

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

The latest stage in the project involves more than 100 intersection and roadway deployments in the city for enhanced signal optimisations and analytics Part of this involves complete coverage of a four-mile-long city corridor. Mid-block locations remain a focus

Lidar sensors are installed on existing traffic poles

areas where we can improve the infrastructure and safety.” Nashville’s pilot scheme involved five intersections and three mid-block areas. “Mid-block areas aren’t something we talk about a huge amount; it’s not something Lidar has been focused on in the marketplace, but road safety statistics show that 70% of pedestrian crashes are occurring at mid-block locations,” Barbour continues. That poses a particular challenge, as those areas cover significantly greater areas than intersections, “but it’s also not an area people are collecting data on, or sensing in”. Pedestrians crossing busy Nashville streets – particularly in the Broadway area – are a particular safety hazard. The area can draw hundreds of thousands of people over a weekend. Targeted studies Reports are produced after each weekend showing demand levels – when activity peaks and when it starts to decline. “You can see the inflection point at which [congestion] really starts to ramp up and when it starts to go down – usually around 2am,” Barbour says. “That helps to determine first-responder staffing levels when it comes to traffic management.” The Nashville project has included a couple of targeted studies involving the identification of a problem and deploying a temporary intervention to see if the Lidar system could measure and change behaviour outside crosswalk crossings. In one, for example, Barbour says: “There was a very clear pattern of how folks were crossing the road. There was a gap in the buildings that tempted people in the mid-block area.” An attempt was made to see if pedestrians could be re-directed to a nearby

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crosswalk. “We put in a temporary construction fence – a plastic barrier-type of thing – for two weeks. It was an experiment to see if we could measure the change in behaviour that this intervention induced. We did see an effect and it was both good and bad. Everybody was diverted and couldn’t cross at the old location. Half went ‘upstream’ and crossed outside the crosswalk, but half went to the signalised crossing at the intersection. It was a completely mixed result, but it showed over the course of a week that we can quickly deploy some intervention and measure the effect on safety.” And, with the Ouster BlueCity system, he adds: “We can do this 10 to 20 times faster than previously - previously, you would wait for a complaint, do something about it and see if more complaints came in.” Barbour does not claim that having better data is going to reduce everybody’s commute by half. “But it’s my opinion that great data is the foundation of incremental improvements we can make to the signal system and traffic flow,” he concludes. “That will show up in reducing delays for the travelling public. Without great data we’re making tweaks around the edges, based on what people can observe. Importantly, I think we’re bringing something that’s completely new to traffic research and the science community.” ITS

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PRODUCTS & INNOVATIONS

MAV AIQ LITE TARGETS ANPR PRICE POINT MAV Systems has launched MAV AiQ Lite, which it says is a "simpler, more compact, and more affordable" ANPR solution. The UK manufacturer's idea is to make available a lower-cost product for traffic management and parking enforcement without sacrificing quality. “The AiQ Lite is about delivering what most deployments actually need; reliable, accurate ANPR in a simple, cost-effective package,” said Andy Humphries, MD at MAV Systems. “It brings MAV performance to everyday environments, without the complexity of higher-end systems.” Built and engineered in Britain, the AiQ Lite has been developed as a streamlined addition to the MAV AiQ platform. The manufacturer says it delivers reliable, high-accuracy plate

capture across typical operating conditions, with strong performance in challenging environments, including poor lighting and adverse weather. It oﬀers two-lane coverage from a single camera, reducing installation complexity and cost, while its all-in-one design means it is easier to deploy. Low power in all lighting conditions makes it ideal for renewable power installs, MAV adds. The AiQ Lite oﬀers intelligent processing which ensures dependable reads even when facing worn, manipulated, partially obscured and damaged licence plates. It is available now for deployment across parking, enforcement, and integrated transport applications. www.anprcameras.com

Colour Lidar launch from Ouster Ouster has launched a portfolio of OS digital Lidar sensors, Rev8, powered by its next-generation L4 Ouster Silicon. The firm says this features the world’s first patented native colour Lidar sensors, with the L4 architecture providing "up to double the range and resolution” of the previous generation. "For the first time, a single Lidar sensor can understand road signs [and] interpret brake lights," Ouster adds. Based on patented Ouster Silicon with embedded Fujifilm colour science, the L4 chip boasts 42.9 GMACs of processing power, detection of up to 20 trillion photons per second and a 40 kHz measurement rate with picosecond timing precision. Ouster says it can process up to 10.4 million points per second and 22.4 gigabits per second of data bandwidth off-chip. The L4 architecture features both the 128 channel L4 and 256 channel L4 Max. Every point is "born" with colour. Rev8 OS features have "completely reimagined" OS0, OS1, and OSDome sensors and have also added the 256-channel OS1 Max, says Ouster. Purpose-built for high-speed autonomy and smart infrastructure, the OS1 Max sees up to 200m at 10% reflectivity with a maximum detection range of 500m, all with a 45° field of view. www.ouster.com

Inrix has initiated a series of major updates to its Signal Analytics platform that are designed to allow transportation agencies to monitor, diagnose and improve signalised intersections. There is no need to install hardware, deploy sensors or change existing workflows, said Inrix, a provider of transportation analytics and mobility intelligence. A ‘before-andafter’ analysis evaluates the impact of signal-timing changes, construction and policy decisions with clear, defensible results. Meanwhile, a ‘green calculator’ puts traffic benefits into real-world terms - such as fuel savings and emissions reduction - to help agencies Follow us on LinkedIn

INRIX IS ALL ABOUT THE TIMING quantify the environmental and cost impact of signal-timing decisions. There is expanded vehicle data information as well as a ‘delay trends’ functionality to understand what effect delay changes - by time of day and day of week - will have on traffic flow. Agencies can now adjust the area of influence - boundaries of observation - of an intersection to give improved flexibility in how they evaluate and analyse signal performance. Steve Remias, head of product strategy for signals at Inrix, says: “This is what signal analytics looks like when it’s built by traffic engineers for traffic engineers.” www.inrix.com

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LIDAR SOLUTION GIVES TATTILE NEW FOCUS

Tattile, well-known for its ANPR cameras, has launched its first Lidar product - called Comark+ Laser - for vehicle classification. Tattile bought Comark, which specialises in laser-based volumetric vehicle measurement and classification for tolling and free-flow tolling applications, nearly two years ago. Comark+ Laser has a 210° aperture angle, and can reliably detect vehicles at speeds of up to 250 km/h, Tattile says, while covering up to two lanes simultaneously. The firm adds that the unit's fog-proof engine effectively prevents interference in harsh weather conditions, "ensuring consistent performance and maximising data reliability even in challenging environments". The compact, all-in-one design requires no external PC, which simplifies installation and reduces overall system complexity. With a laser frequency of 100 Hz, it delivers what Tattile says is an "exceptionally high" level of detail across a wide range of applications. Comark+ Laser is available with an optional radar module, which can be used to determine vehicle speed and direction, and to estimate vehicle length, thereby further improving the accuracy of Lidar vehicle classification. Comark+ Laser is based on Tattile's Stark platform, which complies with IEC 62443 standards. www.tattile.com

TITAN PRO ALL SET FOR E-ZPASS USE multi-protocol operation, enabling compatibility with both current and legacy infrastructure as well as a wide variety of transponders, the manufacturer says. It has four high-speed antenna ports, advanced encryption, embedded applications support, and the latest Rain communication interface (RCI), and now includes NanoSync, a feature which synchronises multiple Titan Pro readers with sub-microsecond level precision via Ethernet. Star Systems says this simplifies system architecture and reduces installation complexity, enabling multireader installations to operate optimally as a unified system, maximising read accuracy and overall system efficiency. www.star-int.net

Tolling specialist Star Systems International's Titan Pro reader has been approved for E-ZPass revenue use. The electronic toll payment system - ubiquitous in the US - lets you pay tolls without stopping. Star Systems says Titan Pro was evaluated for accuracy in over 30,000 complex scenarios, including high-speed traffic, diverse vehicle types, and multi-lane, multi-protocol configurations. “The E-ZPass approval demonstrates that the Titan Pro delivers the accuracy and reliability agencies expect in live tolling environments,” said Stephen Lockhart, president of Star Systems America. The unit is designed for applications such as multi-lane free-flow (MLFF) and open-road tolling (ORT), and supports simultaneous

ITS INTERNATIONAL MAY/JUNE 2026

Miovision launches GenAI agent Miovision has launched Mateo, which it says is the industry’s first purpose-built generative AI (GenAI) agent for intelligent mobility. GenAI is built to create new content rather than simply analysing data: in this case, Miovision says Mateo helps traffic professionals "by converting complex datasets into actionable insights through natural language conversations". It leverages a reasoning engine powered by a large language model (LLM) and agentic tools, allowing users to generate elements such as visual charts, maps, and safety metrics from various data sources. Integrated natively into the Miovision One ecosystem, it can reduce investigation time for citizen complaints or network alerts by up to 95%, the company adds. The idea is that Mateo enables traffic engineers to focus on high-impact engineering work rather than administrative reporting. Brent Rogerson, Miovision's director, solutions engineering, says: "The technical breakthrough with the Miovision GenAI agent lies in its ability to execute multi-step retrieval, reasoning, and data analysis to answer complex questions based on a city’s unique network data while following established traffic engineering standards.” Miovision says it will expand Mateo's capabilities with applications for traffic planning and engineering coming later this year. www.miovision.com

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PRODUCTS & INNOVATIONS

UTA Edenred goes Dutch and transmits the data to the service provider. Charges will be calculated automatically - physical toll gates and traditional toll booths will disappear from Dutch roads. Known as Vrachtwagenheffing, the new toll applies to both Dutch and foreign trucks weighing over 3.5 tonnes that use most of the country's motorways and some provincial and local roads. The OBU must be registered to settle the toll charges - regardless of whether the vehicle is driving on toll roads or not. UTA Edenred said the system will enable a fairer distribution of costs for the use of national roads. Toll revenue is earmarked for the expansion, maintenance and modernisation of the local road network. UTA Edenred recommends that fleet managers order compatible OBUs and fit them to vehicles well ahead of the toll system launch. Existing UTA One Next customers can pre-activate the Dutch toll context in the UTA Service Center to be ready by July. Alternatively, both toll devices can be ordered in the UTA Service Center. https://web.uta.com/en/

Fuel card specialist UTA Edenred has launched three EETS (European Electronic Toll Service) processing options for the Netherlands’ upcoming kilometre-based toll system that starts on 1 July, replacing the longstanding Eurovignette system. UTA One Next is a 4G-compatible OBU for distance-based toll payments. It covers 18 European countries and offers features such as fleet monitoring and remote configuration via the HUB4Trucks platform. UTA RoadPass Pro is a flexible, 4G-compatible OBU designed for distancebased toll payments, particularly in western and central Europe. It encompasses 10 European countries plus numerous bridge and tunnel tolls. Meanwhile, the NedLinq OBU is a Netherlands-only solution and therefore suitable for users with a regular driving profile in the country. However, it can also be used for spontaneous journeys to the Netherlands. Users can obtain an OBU by registering via NedLinq, with billing via the UTA Card. The new Dutch charging system is fully electronic. Every vehicle will have an on-board unit (OBU) that records the kilometres driven

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