Blog

IRD’s tag line — ‘Safer, Greener, Trusted’ — reflects our longstanding areas of focus and commitment to the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) industry. It expresses IRD’s core beliefs, reflects the future envisioned by transportation sector leaders, and encompasses the main aims behind public policy and decision-making. It personifies our very purpose and existence as a business, ensuring a sustainable future for all.

Safer

Around the world, governments, roads authorities, infrastructure owners, managers, and operators have as their common objective the aim of reducing road-traffic-related accidents and fatalities to zero – or as close to that as we can realistically achieve.

Over the past 40 years, IRD’s intelligent transportation technology and solutions have been making roadways and cities safer. In addition to deploying technology to protect infrastructure assets, our technology has also enabled governments worldwide to protect communities and save lives.

IRD’s solutions include implementing innovative systems that discourage speeding and dangerous driving. It also addresses the danger to road users caused by overloaded, unsafe commercial vehicles — whether from the effects of their dynamic performance, or the undue wear and damage caused to pavements and other road infrastructure.

We have been deploying technology to enhance the safety of road users, including drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Through focus and innovation, we continue to develop unique solutions that enable public agencies and road operators to meet their goals in reducing safety incidents.

Greener

The recently concluded COP26 UN Climate Conference took us one step closer to combating the climate crisis. The European Commission supported the consensus and commitments reached by over 190 countries to cut emissions, maintaining the global warming limits first established at the Paris Accord.

Road transport accounts for over 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with emissions rising faster than in many sectors. Our increasingly crowded and mobility-hungry planet needs to find ways to reduce the carbon and particulate outputs related to mobility. The pandemic may have curtailed mobility growth in the short term; however, demand will return even as we implement the lessons from lockdowns via greater use of information and communications technology into the recovery period.

For the journeys which will remain essential for economic and social reasons, congestion and other delays or interruptions to journeys will still affect fuel consumption and emissions. Intelligent traffic management helps reduce urban congestion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Off-route inspections of commercial vehicles to ensure safety and compliance are a major interruption to transportation efficiency — especially considering the large and fuel-hungry commercials fleets on our roads. The safe and accurate assessment of vehicle conditions in live traffic lanes not only allows economic activity to go on unimpeded; it also saves on fuel burn and improves commercial activities’ environmental performance.

Trusted

Long-term partnerships are based on the foundation of interpersonal relationships. Those relationships are always built on trust. Since the very beginning, IRD has always emphasized successful outcomes rather than an overbearing focus on the technology used to achieve the outcomes. Positive results underpin successful policies and operations that in turn generate new demand for transportation solutions and innovation.

As we move towards a smart(er) society in which vehicles and infrastructure around us are instrumented with new technology to deliver information that improves efficiencies and contributes to policy goals, we will be able to rely upon the solutions which deliver and assist in achieving these outcomes.

In the background, technology will continue to be as important as ever and via innovation, we will maintain a mindset of excellence and continual technological evolution. In the forefront, however, we will continue to see an even greater expectation of the delivery of data — accurate, dependable, trusted data — as transportation intelligence powers new outcomes.

Cloud computing and data as a service are increasingly the solutions of choice. Between them, they offer end-users significant advantages, including continual software updates and security upgrades. Further benefits include remote diagnostics and maintenance, and the assurance of systems’ health and performance. At the same time, open-standard philosophies are taken as a given, as solutions need to be able to accommodate feeds from non-proprietary sources.

It involves end-users entrusting more of the data consolidation effort to key providers — a big shift, in ‘ownership’ terms, for many organizations. Nevertheless, for transportation technology leaders like IRD with the right levels of domain knowledge and experience, as well as the ability to deliver remote training and comprehensive support, the evolution from a trusted systems supplier to trusted information and services supplier is a natural one.

Since our foundation, IRD has continued to grow globally based on the trust we have earned from our customers, partners, suppliers, and the worldwide ITS community. As we enter an exciting fifth decade of transformational change, we will persist in serving our society and remain committed to creating a safer and greener planet for our current race and future generations to come.