Change in the Division Management at PTV Transport Consult

Karlsruhe, Germany, 16.02.2017. On 1 March 2017, Werner Balz, Head of the Stuttgart office of PTV Transport Consult GmbH, will retire after 25 years at PTV. His successor will be Dr.-Ing. Hagen Schüller who will become the new Division Manager as of 1 April 2017.

At the beginning of March, Werner Balz, Division Manager for Traffic Control & Management in the Stuttgart office of PTV Transport Consult GmbH, will retire after 25 years at PTV. Starting on 1 April, his successor will be Dr.-Ing. Hagen Schüller, who is currently still a project manager in this division and can also look back across a long history at PTV.

Milestones

For Balz, there have been some milestones during his time at PTV: He played an important role in the establishment of the PTV office in Stuttgart 25 years ago, which was also the starting shot for PTV’s entry into the planning of traffic control and guidance systems on motorways. “Our Stuttgart team has made a significant contribution to ensuring that road users in jam- and accident-prone areas of Germany's motorways and in Austria can be directed safely and well-informed thanks to situation-dependent variable message and information boards,” says Balz.

Further milestones included the first foreign project in 1993, a traffic control and information system for the motorway ring around Budapest (MARABU) and three years later, the first EU research project. “For us here in Stuttgart, naturally this was a bonbon: the planning of a series of traffic control and information systems in preparation for the FIFA Football World Championship in Germany, dynamic guiding boards in Stuttgart, and the addition of dynamic and static sign posting with destinations for the 2006 Football World Championship in the Frankfurt am Main area; these were in 2004 and 2005,” according to Balz.

Road safety becomes ever more important

In October 2010, Hagen Schüller started his position as project manager in Stuttgart, where he established the “Safety management of the road infrastructure” field. Previously, he spent six years as Assistant to the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences at the TU Dresden, where he received his Ph.D. after writing a dissertation on speeds and accidents on city roads. For his future task as new manager of the division, he would like to further reinforce the topic of road safety and link it as a cross-sectional aspect to other topics at PTV Transport Consult. “I would also like to sensitize various external actors about this issue,” says Schüller. At the same time, we should increasingly focus on current topics such as cooperative systems in and outside of tunnels and the planning of video monitoring in various fields of application.

“I can look back with satisfaction across my professional career and go into retirement assured that I have put the division for which I was responsible for so many years into good hands with Hagen Schüller,” says Balz.