Kapsch Presents New Weigh In Motion Solution At ITS Europe
Innovative solution allows increased traffic flows, reduced wear and tear and lowers emissions
Kapsch TrafficCom today announced a new Weigh in Motion (WIM) solution at this year’s ITS European conference in Dublin. The innovative solution allows vehicles to be weighed whilst on the move. This helps to control the number of overloaded heavy vehicles on the roads, increasing road safety, reducing wear and tear and lowering emissions. The technology provides important cost benefits and demonstrates how simple improvements can greatly improve the road networks across Europe.
The solution uses a number of sensors to detect whether the vehicle exceeds the permitted weight along with a number of other enforcement functions. The sensors identify the vehicle by its number plates, storing and evaluating this data via either a mobile enforcement vehicle or via a central system.
There is a clear need for WIM technology, with many road networks seeing increased heavy traffic across Europe. An overloaded vehicle axle has a bearing on the pace of road surface erosion, increases noise pollution, reduces the braking distance, and other parameters which decreases safety on the one hand and increases the costs for the maintenance of road infrastructure. In the Netherlands for example, it’s been shown that the increased maintenance costs of overloaded trucks could be as high as 25%. Therefore, WIM devices could pay for themselves in a relatively short time due to a decreasing number of overloaded trucks and fines generated by trucks still exceeding weight limits.
Peter Ummenhofer, responsible Manager for ITS solutions at Kapsch TrafficCom says: “The pressure on the costs for repair and maintenance of the road networks is increasing as more traffic uses the roads. Weigh-in-Motion assures higher road safety, reduces wear and tear by a decreasing number of overloaded trucks and therefore is an important tool to avoid increasing uncontrolled heavy goods traffic.”
The new WIM solution can be used by customers in combination with Kapsch Force, a comprehensive and fully integrated solution suite, which was launched at the Traffex event in Birmingham (UK) in April 2013. The Kapsch Force enforcement suite supports the vast majority of enforcement applications – red light running, spot and section speed monitoring, lane enforcement, traffic surveillance and Weigh-In-Motion (WIM). The new WIM solution is pre-integrated with Kapsch Force minimizing project risk and ensuring seamless processes across various enforcement applications, from capturing vehicle data to handle infringements according to a given legislative environment..
