ITS Monday: Edition 10, 2025
ITS Monday is a small, weekly collection of curated content from the worlds of intelligent transport systems, smart mobility, and associated areas.
Included this week, considering the e-scooter case, lithium battery issues, better cycling and micromobility, cars in cities, and more.
The article headlines below are:
- Yarra’s e-Scooter exit underscores need for hybrid micromobility approach
- Garbage trucks are catching fire. Your battery could be to blame
- Improving cycling and micromobility planning across Australia and New Zealand
- Why where you work is the new political battleground
- Matched Filtering Based LiDAR Place Recognition for Urban and Natural Environments
- How smart AI traffic lights could prioritise people over cars
- Driving cars in London is a totally pointless activity and I hate it, says Top Gear presenter James May
This week’s articles
Now, scroll down, and see what’s in this week’s edition. Oh, and before you do, be sure check out the quickest way to receive our new content via the subscription box just below …
Yarra’s e-Scooter exit underscores need for hybrid micromobility approach
In last week’s ITS Monday we had a straight news story about the upcoming removal of e-Scooters from the City of Yarra’s streets. This week, we have a comment piece on the situation.
“Following a significant fee hike, the recent withdrawal of shared e-scooter operators from the City of Yarra highlights a critical gap in micromobility management: the need for a hybrid model that combines centralised expertise with local knowledge.”
Related iMOVE projects:
- Safer cycling and street design: A guide for policymakers
- Road use activity data: Cyclists, pedestrians and micromobility
- Modelling cycling investments in regional areas
Related iMOVE articles:
- Active Transport: Info, Projects & Resources
- Micromobility: Info, Projects & Resources
- Road Safety: Info, Projects & Resources
Garbage trucks are catching fire. Your battery could be to blame
“Batteries disposed of incorrectly have caused a spate of fires in garbage trucks across Melbourne, forcing operators to dump smouldering rubbish onto suburban streets. Fire Rescue Victoria’s annual report, released this month, showed that the service has been responding to almost one fire daily caused by lithium-ion batteries. The service has forecast the trend is likely to worsen.”
Related iMOVE article:
Related iMOVE projects:
- Fire safety for EVs and micromobility: Best practice assessment
- EV batteries: Repair, refurbish, repurpose, recycle
- Second lives for electric vehicle batteries
Improving cycling and micromobility planning across Australia and New Zealand
“Austroads has released a new report recommending how to improve planning for cycling and micromobility across Australia and New Zealand. The report highlights the importance of planning for the increasing numbers of people on bikes and people on e-scooters.”
READ THE ARTICLE
Why where you work is the new political battleground
“The debate over work from home is rapidly becoming a war over the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of Australians. Debate among business leaders and economists over work-from-home has accelerated since the pandemic upended traditional approaches to work.”
Related iMOVE articles:
- Working from Home: Info, Projects & Resources
- Prospects for Working from Home: Assessing the evidence
Matched Filtering Based LiDAR Place Recognition for Urban and Natural Environments
A new academic paper, co-authored by Therese Joseph, Tobias Fischer, and Michael Milford. The abstract:
Place recognition is an important task within autonomous navigation, involving the re-identification of previously visited locations from an initial traverse. Unlike visual place recognition (VPR), LiDAR place recognition (LPR) is tolerant to changes in lighting, seasons, and textures, leading to high performance on benchmark datasets from structured urban environments.
However, there is a growing need for methods that can operate in diverse environments with high performance and minimal training. In this letter, we propose a handcrafted matching strategy that performs roto-translation invariant place recognition and relative pose estimation for both urban and unstructured natural environments.
Our approach constructs Birds Eye View (BEV) global descriptors and employs a two-stage search using matched filtering — a signal processing technique for detecting known signals amidst noise. Extensive testing on the NCLT, Oxford Radar, and WildPlaces datasets consistently demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across place recognition and relative pose estimation metrics, with up to 15% higher recall than previous state-of-the-art.
Related iMOVE articles:
- Autonomous Driving Info, Projects & Resources
- Autonomous Driving Technology
- Connected Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources
Related iMOVE projects:
- C-ITS national harmonisation and pre-deployment research
- Environmental impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles
- Safely deploying automated vehicles on Australian roads
How smart AI traffic lights could prioritise people over cars
“Traffic lights are for cars. But what if they could see waiting pedestrians and even prioritise them, without having to tap a “beg button” and hope it actually does something? That’s one of many benefits promised by a project at Aston University, which pairs a low-cost 360-degree camera with AI analysis in order to better manage traffic — and the researchers have been running it on a live intersection in Coventry, UK.”
Related iMOVE articles:
READ THE ARTICLE
James May says driving in London feels like a “totally pointless activity” and that cars don’t belong in towns and cities. The former co-host of Top Gear and The Grand Tour said he “hates” driving in the capital and added: “It amazes me that people go to the shops a mile away in the car.”
READ THE ARTICLEWe used to send out a weekly newsletter, ITS Weekly Roundup, a collection of ITS- and mobility-related news from across the world. ITS Monday is a replacement for that, a collection of links to news and opinion pieces, academic papers, and more. Additionally, you can follow us on Linkedin and Twitter, both of which have a focus on iMOVE news and projects, or subscribe to our bi-monthly newsletter.
*Inclusion in ITS Monday does not equal iMOVE endorsement. It’s more aimed at discovery, thought, or discussion … or all of those and more. And while for the most part I expect content to be current, a little age doesn’t mean diminished interest.
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