Unfortunately I was only able to attend the last day of this event, but the proceedings were relatively comprehensive. The proceedings were only presentation thumbnails, however, no formal paper submissions were in the journal, hence there is a lack of detail if not actually attending these presentations. This review is consequently based on the final day only and not the 3 preceeding days of this event.

Attendance

Attendance was relatively poor with approximately 30 delegates and presenters present, this was apparently the level in attendance for the previous days of the conference. Most of the attendees were either from local government or public transport infrastructure and information service providers, I think I was the only person directly involved in traffic information and definitely the only person involved in the private vehicle user market (i.e. cars).

The Kensington Hilton, London, location of RTPI'05.

Presentations

The morning of the last day covered the implementation of passenger and operator information for various rail networks and the Paris and London bus services. There was a good international mix with French, Canadian, English and Swedish speakers. The afternoon looked mainly at the communications infrastructure side from Orange, the possible use of a standard x86 computing platform (clearly not in the real automotive world) and my own presentation on the Trafficmaster system of collecting and disseminating the UK's traffic congestion information.

Overall

From an automotive designer or vehicle manufacturer viewpoint there was little to be gained from this conference. It is definitely targeted at the public transport and passenger information service provider, operating companies and local government agencies tasked with integrating local intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Most of the systems described were at least in-service, hence this was not a "coming soon" type of event that can be disappointing if looking for available solutions today. There were essentially just two media available for the information delivery of the information being discussed; WiFi and GPRS/UMTS. Almost every speaker (including myself) mentioned these in their presentation and the overriding impression is that the systems and technologies are here today and in proven use in many parts of the world.

Martin O'Hara

Trafficmaster

21^st March 2005