personnel

Mark IV IVHS the Mississauga Ontario based-business that provides the transponders and readers for the E-ZPass Inter Agency Group is losing Martin Capper, president since 2001 and a senior officer there previously.  Capper has presided over the growth of Mark IV into the largest supplier of electronic toll equipment in north America.

North Texas Tollway Authority's board has appointed Allen Clemson their new executive director, effective June 1. Clemson, 60, is completely new to the toll industry. His most recent job was special assistant to the vice chancellor of University of North Texas (UNT) Dallas Campus where his bio describes him as overseeing administration and finance.

Harvey Goodwin, administrator of the Bureau of Turnpikes in the New Hampshire DOT since 1997 has retired from there last week at age 60. A civil engineer he worked most of his career in NHDOT, first in construction, then in bridge maintenance where he rose to the top. At the Turnpikes bureau he went through the conversion to electronic tolling and his last big push was for toll increases and to get authority to put open road tolling in at the I-95 mainline plaza in Hampton - with enabling legislation passed in the week of his retirement.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission says that the state secretary of transportation Allen Biehler "was recently named chairman..." We looked at Governor Rendell's news releases to see if he'd named Biehler. Nothing. Apparently the Commission "names" its own. In this case Biehler as state secretary of transportation was already an ex-officio commissioner.

The salaries paid to Mike Snyder Orlando toll's executive director and other senior staff came under fire at the first meeting of a Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) from the committee chairman, former senator Dan Webster. Webster said he had identified over $600k/year in salary cuts needed at the Orlando Orange County (Toll) Expressway Authority, singling out executive director Mike Snyder.

Salahdin Yacoubi has been appointed president of the Kapsch group subsidiary in South Africa. Yacoubi has been a leading figure in managing two of the world's first three implementations of all electronic tolling - Melbourne CityLink in Australia and Autopista Central in Santiago Chile. (The other was 407ETR in Toronto Canada.)

Bob Daigh Austin district engineer at TxDOT is leaving at the month's end. Daigh has been the key figure in developing a network of tollroads around the Texas capital area. In his mid-50s he's got another good career ahead of him. We haven't heard whether he has another job lined up, but given his accomplishments in the state capital there should be plenty of people with offers.

Steve Fernandez, 34, formerly a concessions analyst at the European investment research firm Exane BNP Parabis in London has been appointed director of investor relations at Abertis, one of Europe's largest tollroad operators. He's moving to Abertis head office in Barcelona Spain.

Chairman of the Central Texas Regional MobilityAuthority (CTRMA) since its inception Bob Tesch is packing it in. Only last week reappointed by the Governor, he said he'd had second thoughts.

The news was hailed as "the best transportation news I've heard in a long while" by local grouch, and transplanted New Yorker Peter Stern, so it must be bad news. But then Texas has been a lot of bad news for tolling the past couple of years.

Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's premier researcher and writer on megaprojects and traffic and revenue methodologies is moving closer to the world's financial center of gravity - from Copenhagen to about midway between London and New York, namely Oxford England.