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Five transport solutions we wouldn't have thought possible ten years ago

There were only 66 years between the first manned flight and the first moon landing. Transport technology, if you excuse the pun, moves at an incredible rate and if you look back at new technological developments that took you by surprise at previous Intertraffic shows it becomes clear that on a daily basis we’re using things that weren’t even at the prototype stage 10 years ago.

With that in mind we asked a selection of experts, colleagues, exhibitors and visitors to identify one new solution that in 2012 would have been dismissed as a flight of fancy. We compiled our top five, in no particular order, but if there’s something not included in this article then please get in touch with your own nomination and we will include it in a revised version later this year.

Firstly, two notes. One, we have not included Mobility as a Service, largely because although it was still a fledgling sector there was plenty of talk in the traffic and transport press about the rise of MaaS. Secondly, perhaps the biggest change over the last decade is that private sector investment into smart transport projects now has the edge over public sector, but our survey was focused on the technology itself – but perhaps we can revisit this as a separate feature at a later date.

More articles on this topic

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DATA DRIVEN TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT: A QUESTION OF TRUST
SMART MOBILITY: FROM DATA TO INFORMATION TO INSIGHT TO ACTION
URBAN MOBILITY DEVELOPMENTS: PAST AND FUTURE

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

New challenges are forcing transport operators to look for new, smart solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has evolved rapidly over the past five years, and advances in next-generation sensors are successfully addressing these challenges. Simply put, AI is changing the way that the transportation industry functions. The parking sector, the world connected and automated vehicle, traffic management scenarios, environmental measuring – all constituent parts of the smart mobility sector that are increasingly feeling the benefit of huge advance in artificial intelligence. The potential for AI is almost limitless. We use AI, knowingly or otherwise, multiple times every day. Its influence can range from changing traffic flow based on particulate matter emissions to a social media platform showing you an advert for a product you have just talked about in a mobile phone call to handing over control of monotonous, laborious tasks such as crop-reaping or long-distance logistical operations.

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“If we're going to have a discussion around how potentially AI can make a leap forward, we must look at its use in connected and autonomous vehicles. CAVs collect petabytes (1015) of data about the world around them on a daily basis,” says AI expert Keith McCabe, “and most of it is thrown away, or barely analyzed at all, apart from in the instant that it's collected. However, if you can analyze a bit more we can have a much better understanding of the road network, or the other networks that connected and autonomous vehicles are used on. Artifical intelligence allows for that.”

The more we can interpret that data the better understanding we have of those networks and the world they inhabit. AI affords the ability of taking that vast quantity of data and turning it into useful information and helps the private and public sectors to come to agreements with the organizations that are collecting those vast quantities of data to see how that information can be used. Artificial intelligence gives us a much richer understanding of the world around us.

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AUTOMATED TRUCKS

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