Peek Traffic Brand Guidelines: Abingdon Signals, Imtech, SWARCO & a US Rename as Oriux

An Abingdon group that bought its way into traffic.

Peek Traffic is a name that has belonged to several companies on two continents. Today the European rights to the name belong to SWARCO and the American business trades as Oriux, but in the early 1990s Peek Traffic was the traffic division of Peek Plc, which a 1991 report in Tech Monitor’s archive describes as a traffic and field data systems company based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Peek Plc also owned Husky, a maker of ruggedised handheld computers for field data work, and a measurement business, Peek Measurement.

The traffic side grew through purchases. In April 1991 Peek agreed to buy 80 per cent of Philips Verkeers en Vervoerssystemen, the traffic business of Philips, based in Hilversum with 175 employees and working in traffic control, motorway guidance and public transport; it was to be renamed Peek Traffic BV, Tech Monitor’s archive reports. In 1992, the same archive reported in March 1993, Peek bought the four traffic systems companies of EB Signals in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, forming Peek Traffic Scandinavia, along with the Norwegian firm Gemo Elektro, Unicomp in the former East Germany and a majority holding in STM of Munich. In March 1993 it added the American companies Signal Control and Signal Maintenance, purchases that Peek said gave it a large share of the world market for traffic controllers.

In Britain, the March 1993 report said Peek had completed the integration of Ferranti’s traffic activities during 1992, moving signal production to Winchester and systems development to Cheadle. The SABRE roads wiki, a volunteer-written history of British roads, dates the Ferranti buy-out to 1993, followed by Elequip Traffic Signals, and says that in 1995 Peek bought the traffic controls business of GEC, gaining its urban traffic control system and its ownership rights to SCOOT. In the late 1990s, the wiki adds, Peek bought Page and moved to a newly developed modular signal head, the Elite.

Controllers, SCOOT and a push into Asia.

Peek sold the equipment that sits in the cabinet at the kerb. In January 1994 Tech Monitor described it as a company that “sells the embedded controllers that make traffic lights switch on and off,” and noted that its controllers used a Motorola 68302 processor running the pSOS real-time operating system.

That article followed Peek into Asia. It reported that the company was active in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Nordic region and Asia; that it had recently opened an office in Hong Kong and invested in a control-systems firm in China and in KEC Engineering of Singapore, which it used to sell traffic controllers there; and that it held a sub-contract from the Bangkok Municipal Authority for a computerised urban traffic system covering 143 junctions in its first stage. That system used SCOOT, the Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique, run from a central computer to which all the controllers in an area were linked.

Peek’s interests also reached into the vehicle. Tech Monitor reported in 1993 and 1994 that Peek held a stake in General Logistics, the Luton company developing Trafficmaster, a driver information system that used infrared beacons on English motorways to relay traffic conditions to a terminal in the car. The 1993 report also listed Peek Traffic Inc. in the United States, whose Transyt traffic system had traded well, and Peek Verkehrssysteme in Germany, where the company expected motorway guidance and public transport systems to follow.

How traffic system makers present themselves.

Traffic system makers sell to road authorities, cities and motorway operators rather than to the public, yet their work is some of the most visible equipment in any town. The signal heads at a junction, the gantries that span a motorway, the cameras mounted on poles and the white and yellow lines painted on the road surface all come from a small group of specialist companies, and most drivers pass their products without ever seeing a brand name.

That makes the way these companies present themselves unusual. Their brochures and websites tend to show the infrastructure in use: a junction at dusk with the signals lit, a motorway gantry carrying message signs, a tunnel portal, or a road-marking crew laying fresh lines at night while traffic is diverted. The other recurring picture is the control room, where operators sit in front of a wall of screens and maps showing the road network in real time.

Much of the business is built on long contracts, technical standards and acquisitions. Many of today’s groups were assembled by buying smaller signal makers, detection specialists and software companies, so one group may carry several older brand names in different countries, and a product range may run from glass beads and road paint to controllers, sensors and traffic management software.

The industry meets at trade fairs. Intertraffic, held in Amsterdam, with related events in the Americas, Asia and China, is one of the places where makers set out stands of signals, cameras and control-room displays for road authorities and contractors. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it today and what it says about where its products are made, marking clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, two separate companies.

The European and American businesses later went separate ways: the SABRE roads wiki describes Peek Traffic in Britain and Europe and the Peek Traffic Corporation in the United States as two independent companies, each owned by other technology groups.

In Europe, the Dutch group Imtech announced on 5 April 2007 that it would buy the entire share capital of Peek Traffic Holdings from the BNP Paribas Group and other investors, describing a company with more than 600 employees and a strong position in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. In April 2013 Imtech announced at the Traffex exhibition that from 1 May 2013 Peek Traffic Limited would be renamed Imtech Traffic & Infra UK Limited, Highways Industry reported. In 2015 the private equity company Egeria took over the Imtech traffic business, which traded as Dynniq. On 30 September 2021 SWARCO, the Austrian traffic technology group, completed the purchase of all the shares in Dynniq Mobility, of Amersfoort, Traffic Technology Today reported; in March 2022 SWARCO announced that the Dynniq brand would be wound up. Shortly after the deal a SWARCO manager told Highways News, “We also now own the famous Peek name.”

In the United States, the company now called Oriux says it was formerly known as Peek Traffic, a subsidiary of Signal Group, and that it rebranded as Oriux in 2020, bringing Peek and Signal Group together under one name; the old Peek Traffic web address now forwards to Oriux. Oriux says it makes traffic cabinets, controllers, monitors and vehicle counters, and that its manufacturing facility is certified to ISO 9001:2015.

For a design guide, Peek Traffic shows how a product name can outlast the companies that carried it, passing from a British plc to a Dutch group and an Austrian one in Europe, and into a new name in the United States. Compare SWARCO, which owns the European Peek name, and Siemens, which also made traffic signals in Britain, according to the SABRE roads wiki. For this guide we use a go green, amber and cabinet graphite with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Peek Traffic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.