Georgia DOT (in collaboration with Serco), Caltrans (in collaboration with Xerox) and Savari Inc. were the three winners in last night’s (June 12) Best of ITS Awards, which took place during an evening reception at the McEnery Convention Center, San Jose.
For the first time ever the awards were judged live by attendees at the reception. Each of the 16 nominees had a small stand where they were able to present their innovations. Transportation professionals attending the event were then invited to vote on their favorites, in each of the three categories, by placing their business cards in bowls on the relevant stands.
“This is the best of ITS,” ITS America President and CEO Regina Hopper (pictured, above) told Traffic Technology Today. “We have had submissions from agencies and private entities who have over the course of the last couple of years done ITS technology deployment. And what you are seeing, in all three of our categories – Wheels and Things, Infrastructure of Things, and Show Me The Money – are ways in which they have interpreted that. And crowd has been doing the votingÂ…”
In the category Wheels and Things, Savari (pictured, above) won for its Vehicle-to-Phone (V2P) system. This makes pedestrians and bicyclists active participants in the V2X landscape, by connecting them to vehicles and traffic lights through their smartphones without the need for DSRC.
In the hotly contested Infrastructure of Things category, Caltrans and Xerox (pictured, above) won for their Vehicle Passenger Detection System, which is able to monitor vehicle occupancy in HOV lanes in California. The system was set up to determine existing system accuracy and violation rates, with enlightening results.
Finally in the Show Me The Money category, Georgia DOTÂ and Serco (pictured, below) won for their Georgia NaviGator Comprehensive ITS Maintenance. The system has been able to maintain the highest levels of operational availability of ITS through constant monitoring and preventative and responsive maintenance statewide, to reduce overall costs. It has made it possible to achieve 99.34% device availability on approximately 3,000 ITS devices on the system.
“This is ITS America’s opening reception,” added Hopper. “We’re really looking forward now to the next few days. This year we have keynotes, rather than plenaries, where one big speaker talks about their vision for their world. And we also have two SuperSessions: one called Technology Driven By The C-Suite, and the USDOT Modal Administrators on Wednesday. It’s going to be a great week.”
The awards reception was sponsored by Econolite, AAA and Kapsch.
