• The Road Assistant project will be rolled out in three schools in the city of Madrid -Tajamar, Sagrado Corazón de Jesús and Julián Marías- with the aim of improving road safety around these centres and to include young people with Down’s syndrome and other intellectual disabilities into the work market.

• The Abertis Foundation, Barcelona City Council, the Catalonian Down’s Syndrome Foundation, Transportes Metropolitanos de Barcelona, the city’s public transport operator, and Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya, the regional train operator and a new member, have launched the KanGo! project for the second year. The aim of this initiative is to make it easier for school pupils in Barcelona’s Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district to use public transport independently.

• The Roman quarry of Mèdol on the AP-7 motorway and the UNESCO Centre on Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves in Castellet – home to the Abertis Foundation – saw a surge in activity during the summer tourist season in Catalonia.

• The Mediterranean Biosphere Reserves Network initially numbers 60 reserves in 14 countries.

The “Let’s Learn by Looking at Road Signs” road safety scheme was set up to educate a generation of the public to be aware of the responsibility involved in driving a vehicle

on public roads and the importance of safeguarding lives. The programme has reached 1,300,000 people including schoolchildren in state and private schools, special schools

and adults in the 7 municipalities the toll road runs through.

The Fourth Abertis International Prize for Transport Infrastructure has been awarded to Dr. Julien Monteil, in the doctoral thesis category, for his work entitled “Investigating the effects of cooperative vehicles onhighway traffic flow homogenization: analytical and simulation studies“. In the dissertations and final theses or masters category the winner was Irene Martínez Santamaría for her work “Effects of freeway traffichomogeneity on lane changing activity: the role of dynamic speed limits”. Both were this year’s winners of the national prizes in their respective categories, which were conferred by the Abertis Chair in France and Spain.