ITS UK has made four Awards for Excellence in intelligent transport systems (ITS), with the presentations made at the organization’s President’s Dinner in the City of London on July 20.
The awards, which are open to any organization or individual with a UK business office, were judged by an eminent panel of ITS professionals chaired by ITS UK president and former Transport Minister Steven Norris.
The panel members were: Professor Anil Namdeo, Newcastle University; Lucy Wickham, Mouchel; Neal Skelton, ITS UK; Paul Hutton, Smart Highways Magazine; Wayne Stant, Clearview Traffic; and Steve Gooding, RAC Foundation. The winners were:
• Young ITS Professional of the Year – Nathan Watt of Atkins, who has worked within the ITS industry for two years, during which he has been involved with a variety of projects and has demonstrated his ability to quickly pick-up new concepts and exercise core consultancy competencies. Watt has worked on a project for Kent Country Council investigating detection on the road network, specifically floating vehicle data. This year, he has been heavily involved with developing a new generation of ramp metering for Highways England, which has the potential to be a powerful new traffic management technique.
• Neville Rees and Peter Hills Award for outstanding personal contribution – Andy Graham, founder of White Willow Consulting. His 30 years of experience includes working on motorway control, NADICS in Scotland, at England’s regional and national centers, and on Transport for London’s (TfL) Freeflow project. An authority on connected vehicles, much of his work has been for the Department for Transport (DfT), including removing HGV blind spots and recent work with the UK’s Center for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (C-CAV). Graham has also worked with many local authorities on real-world ITS deployments, and recently helped deploy free flow charging at the M25 Dartford Crossing in the UK and in Canada, and has worked on road charging schemes in Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Bulgaria and the USA. He has also been an auditor for the European Commission.
• Scheme/Product of the Year – NextAgent ‘video ticket office’ at Stansted Airport, which is an innovative hybrid between a virtual walk-up ticket office, a ticket vending machine, and a video-linked call center. It was created by Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS). A trial is underway at Stansted Airport in partnership with train operating company Abellio Group. Since its introduction in October 2015, it has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from users, with a third claiming it would increase their likelihood of using the train for their onward journeys, which would help ease road congestion.
• Forward Thinking Award – Smart Mobility Living Lab in Greenwich, created by TRL with the support of the Royal Borough of Greenwich local authority, C-CAV, Innovate UK, and DfT. It is an initiative to provide a real-world test environment for the accelerated testing and development of intelligent, connected and/or automated transport technologies, unifying three Innovate UK projects, GATEway, MOVE_UK and Atlas, under its umbrella. The Lab enables testing in complex urban environments, with a range of multimodal transport options, to enable investigations into how mobility can be optimized.
