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Hakon Volldal, CEOHaving witnessed the growing amount of smart city initiatives wherein data is becoming a crucial component in the mobility infrastructure, Q-Free started its strategic evolution from being a provider of electronic toll collection solutions to a full intelligent transport systems (ITS) company. Today Q-Free has become one brand consisting of seven acquired ITS companies, creating an extensive portfolio of five service lines with cutting-edge solutions.
The first in their portfolio, Q-Free’s electronic tolling solutions, enable cities to limit road traffic and use the revenue from tolls to build environment-friendly and effective mass transit solutions. Their parking guidance solutions give drivers dynamic, real-time information about parking availability, reducing emissions from cars circling to find parking spaces. On the other hand, their weigh-in-motion systems reduce the number of overweight trucks on roads that contribute to the rapid wear of infrastructure, increased traffic emissions, and road safety problems. The company also limits the emissions from idling cars through their smart traffic controllers which allow smooth traffic flows through intersections.
Promoting seamless integration and transparency between these innovative service lines, Q-Free’s OpenTMS Advanced Traffic Management System’s (ATMS) modular platform can interface with multiple platforms and other solutions, providing a data collection, analysis, and distribution capability which enables real-time management. For example, it incorporates parking management and guidance including both urban and truck parking, allowing traffic operators to monitor and enforce parking within regions. It also gives operators road pricing information from congestion charging systems thereby allowing them to plan for upcoming traffic patterns/ events and post relevant information on highways signs. It also caters to information exchanges with Cooperative ITS/ Connected Vehicle infrastructure and has traffic signal control software that allows fully integrated urban and inter-urban system management.
Stockholm and Gothenburg are among the cities that partnered with Q-Free for their ‘smart city’ drives and deployed a congestion tax system wherein the company supplied Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) tools. The initiative demonstrated traffic reduction of 20 percent in Stockholm and 10 percent in Gothenburg. Furthermore, travel time improved by 30 percent and 25 percent while gas emissions were reduced by eight percent and five percent. Today, Q-Free serves 300 parking facilities and does traffic management for more than 500,000 lane-miles of roadway used by 25 million people. The company has more than 400 employees across 20 markets, who work together to foster ease of mobility across neighborhoods.
Some of the other innovations that Q-Free is presently working on include radar-based parking sensors to further reduce investment overhead for their clients. Systems for weigh-in-motion for trucks combined with electronic tolling systems and weather stations with traffic management centers are among the other projects being developed within the company’s labs. “As Q-Free builds clear and distinctive leadership positions in its target segments, we have the opportunity to more than double in size in the coming five years through organic initiatives,” concludes Volldal.
Q-Free joins the iATL connected vehicle partner alliance
Friday, September 22, 2023
ITS firm Q-Free has announced that is has joined the Infrastructure Automotive Technology Laboratory (iATL) Alliance, a private-sector funded initiative working to accelerate connected vehicle technology through industry collaboration to save lives, improve traffic, and reduce the environmental impact of transportation.
Real-world testing poses a significant hurdle for the deployment of connected vehicle (CV) technology, often necessitating expensive setups and late-night sessions in empty lots, Q-Free noted. To improve real-world CV testing capabilities, the iATL operates a 4,400ft2 lab serving as a dedicated engineering technical facility to test connected vehicle applications.
The lab houses dozens of traffic controllers that control equipment including signs, signals, smart arrows, and school zone beacons, making it a crucial hub for testing CV technology across multiple platforms or devices, all the while ensuring interoperability.
“This partnership with the iATL Alliance is about more than just advocacy,” said Tim Bean, Q-Free executive VP of technology. “With its test facilities and record of innovation in connected vehicle technology, Q-Free gains a partner that helps promote CV technology advancements and the ability for real-world testing.”
Connecting vehicles with the traffic infrastructure improves traffic, lowering congestion and emissions. It’s also an efficient way to protect vulnerable road users like cyclists and pedestrians and make strides to advance Vision Zero initiatives. Connected vehicle technology is a necessary first step to creating smart cities where all road users benefit from data communication between many active devices.
Q-Free EVP of operations, Whitney Nottage, highlights a CV project in Georgia, US, that coincides with the iATL partnership: “Joining the iATL Alliance now is a timely partnership given our current efforts on the Gwinnett County Smart Cities project. In this project, we’ve completed some exciting developments on MAXTIME cv to enable robust transit signal priority, emergency vehicle pre-emption service applications, and multiple TIM messaging applications. Additional efforts are ongoing with this project to further enhance Kinetic CV for scheduling TIM broadcasts, CV data logging, and more.”
MAXTIME cv is Q-Free’s app that runs locally on an intersection controller. It broadcasts real-time traffic signal data (SPaT, MAP, SSM, and more) to connected vehicles, sharing crucial data like position and lane tracking, speed, or emergency broadcasts. The system also receives data (SRM, BSM, PSM messages) that enables safety and mobility applications like dilemma zone and red-light runner detection.
Kinetic CV makes connected vehicle data for SPaT and MAP available centrally and within an API, enabling third-party systems to subscribe to large amounts of CV data from a single system. It is built on the Kinetic Mobility platform for ease of use and scalability.
Company
Q-Free
Management
Hakon Volldal, CEO and Chesapeake, VA
Description
Brings a smart city ITS portfolio comprising five service lines with cuttingedge
solutions for tolling, parking, inter-urban, urban, and infomobility
