AUTONOMOUS ARRIVAL AUTO ALLIANCE CLEAN CITY
Work has begun on the 300km
autonomous vehicle trial route
which will span from Coventry to
Birmingham. Midlands Future Mobility
test environment will see autonomous
vehicles trialled on urban, rural,
suburban and highway roads.
The project is run by a consortium
of companies including Vodafone,
WMG, MIRA, AVL, Transport for West
Midlands, Costain, Amey and Wireless
Infrastructure Group among others.
The route has been developed
by Transport for West Midlands in
collaboration with Coventry City
Council, Birmingham City Council and
Solihull Council and provides more
than 300km of inner city, suburban
and rural roads from Coventry to
Birmingham, on which to fully assess
vehicle performance in a wide range
of real world locations and situations.
The first types of vehicle to be trialled
along the route will be ‘connected’
vehicles. Connected vehicles can
‘talk’ to each other and warn of traffic,
crashes and other hazards that other
connected vehicles may have seen or
be heading towards.
The vehicles on the route will initially
have a driver and occasionally a
second person monitoring how
the vehicles are working, with the
ultimate aim for them to become fully
driverless.
Japanese giants Toyota Motor
Corporation and NTT Corporation
have entered into a memorandum of
understanding (MoU) for a new “smart
city solution”.
The two partners will develop a data
platform which will compile and analyse
information from homes, vehicles, and
public institutions, which will be used
to create new services focusing on
transportation, health, and energy usage.
In terms of cost, both parties will invest
a total of JPY 200 billion ($1.8 billion)
in each other to cement the smart
city alliance. Under the terms of the
agreement, Toyota will take a 2.07%
stake in Japan’s biggest telecoms
company, while NTT will take a 0.9%
stake in the automaker.
The smart city platform will be first
implemented in the Higashi-Fuji area
of Susono City, Shizuoka Prefecture
(Woven City) and in the Shinagawa
area in Minato-ku, Tokyo. The partners
plan to introduce the platform in
additional cities in the future.
“It is necessary not only for each
company to engage in its own projects
but also for both companies to work
closely in jointly building and operating
the ‘Smart City Platform’,” the
companies said in a statement.
New Zealand-owned waste management
and streetscape maintenance company,
Civic Contractors, has introduced an
innovative, electric-powered (EV) truck
that sanitises wheelie bins and steamcleans
city streets with high-pressure hot
water.
The 11-tonne truck picks-up, hotwashes
and steams the insides of
various-sized wheelie bins, killing
pathogens and bacteria (including
Covid-19) and eliminating bad smells.
Its dual function pressure-washes and
sanitises hard surfaces like city streets
and pavements, using steam.
“Hot-washing and steam cleaning is an
effective solution for killing pathogens
and bacteria that spread disease, but
also that attract rodents and make
the rubbish bins stink. Now with the
Covid-19 crisis, the issue of sanitisation
of hard surfaces and bins has become
more important than ever,” said Bjorn
Revfeim, managing director of Civic
Contractors.
“We’ve custom-designed the truck in
the hope that New Zealand will take
further steps to increase environmentally
friendly waste collection services such
as residential food waste collections,
and eventually eliminate the need for
single-use plastic bags in public streets
and parks bins,” Revfeim said.
32 ISSUE 23 2020 / WWW.AFMA.ORG.AU