The European Transport Conference is a yearly organised by the Association for European Transport (AET). Rijkswaterstaat is a member of this organisation, that aims to be a platform of European transport professionals and that promotes the exchange of ideas, information and possiblities for cooperations among its members. From September 29th until October 1st 2014 this conferenc was held in Frankfurt, Germany. Henk Taale attended it and presented the road safety situation in the Netherlands. He also presented a paper on the use of traffic lights to meter traffic. All in all it was a interesting conference with a good mixture of research and practical topics.

The Colloquium Transport Planning Research (in Dutch: Colloquium Vervoersplanologisch Speurwerk) is a yearly 2-day conference that aims to be the platform where researchers, policy makers and other meet and discuss topics at the crossroads of traffic transport and spatial planning. After the 40th anniversary last year in Rotterdam, the conference was held this time in Eindhoven. TrafficQuest was present to present the results of the workshop on urban traffic management. The paper and presentation can be downloaded, but are in Dutch.

Cooperative ITS and Automatic Driving receive a lot of attention at this moment. Initiatives are developed and a number of different stakeholders (individual or in some form of cooperation) are working on these topics around the world. TrafficQuest has published in 2011 a state-of-the-art report on the topic of cooperative ITS, but in the last couple of years rapid developments took place, which made an update more than welcome. Also automatic driving is now a hot topic and considering the connections between automatic driving and cooperative ITS both topics are discussed (in Dutch!) in the report State-of-the-Art achtergronddocument “Coöperatieve systemen en Automatisch rijden”.