European ITS Platform

Recognizing that climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the World, European institutions decided to make Europe climate-neutral by the year 2050. On the other hand, Europe has recently reaffirmed one of its ambitious long-term goals: to improve road safety even more. A new goal sees European roads to move close to zero fatalities by 2050. Moreover EU transport ministers, for the first time, set a target for reducing serious injuries, namely to halve their number by 2030. 

On the one hand, the European road network is demanded to secure our society both by contributing to the efficiency of supply chains, and by offering chances to the individual freedom of travel, making self-evident the need for more efficient and resilient European transport systems. On the other hand, climate goals and traffic safety are becoming more and more a need of the European society. An efficient use of the existing road infrastructure through the use of new and innovative technologies is indispensable.

Through the Digital Agenda and further the European Strategy for Data, the European Union has pointed at digitalization as a key element in future European development. Digitalization and data-driven innovation is expected to bring enormous benefits for citizens, not least within the mobility sector where digitalization will contribute to safer and more efficient transport with far less impact on the environment than what we currently see. Digitalization is a prerequisite for electric and automated mobility which are important parts of the European Green Deal. A growing economy and an increasing demand for transport of goods and people also meet serious limitations to the possibility to expand the transport networks. In large parts of Europe investments in infrastructure are limited to elimination of bottlenecks and safety hazards. Increasing capacity by adding infrastructure has become very complicated and brings tremendous costs. Instead increased capacity has to follow from better use of investments already made which can be achieved through further digitalization. In addition, the users of the transport network will experience new and better services through access to digital means. Hence digitalization of road transport and new services provided by road operators and other actors can make significant contributions to Europe. However, experience shows that planning and budgets from a national perspective do not give a sufficiently high priority to multi-national cross-border investments to equip the European road corridors with the system and services needed and possible. Data driven innovation is hampered by lack of harmonization and scattered development.

Therefore, the European ITS Platform has developed a set of recommended actions for Core Network Corridor digitalization that go beyond the responsibilities of national authorities and contribute to the build of a European road transport system. These actions require European cooperation to take place and should be considered as necessary building blocks of coming European initiatives involving road authorities and operators.

Automation and automated driving are key tools in making the development to zero fatalities and low carbon emissions reality. Automated driving is advancing to driverless and self-driving vehicles in the road environments that enable this by providing the physical and digital infrastructure required by such vehicles. The road operators are in key position to provide those infrastructures as well as the traffic management support needed. How road authorities and operators should now proceed is still partly unclear due to many issues. The technology solutions are still evolving fast with regard to the sensors, AI and software of the automated vehicles making it difficult to predict what level of infrastructure support is needed by automated vehicles rolled out in 2030 or 2040. The details of the future automated vehicles’ behaviour, especially in critical situations where they can not continue automated driving, are not available. The legal frameworks for driverless vehicles are not in place. These are only a few of the issues still remaining before the full-scale roll-out of highly automated vehicles as well as investments in the infrastructures to facilitate their operation on open roads. 

Throughout the course of its own studies, the European ITS Platform (Evaluation Group), in conjunction with ITS Corridors and experts in the field, have developed a suite of tools and guidance designed to nurture a harmonised approach to the Evaluation of ITS. The ITS Corridors have in-turn adopted this approach, which has helped to make the benefits of ITS investments across Europe more consistent, more comparable and more visible. Initial Corridor results based on this commonly adopted approach are now presented in a single source – the Digitalization of Road Transport in Europe book – which contains an overview of the overall impacts and benefits of co-funded ITS investment.  ITS systems and services increase the performance of hard infrastructures, such as roads. They can do so for all policy goals: safety, mobility, the environment and climate change. At the same time they provide the data and services for the digitalization of the Core Network Corridors, the comprehensive TEN-T and other networks including urban, building the Single European Transport Area and integrating with the society-wide digitalization. The evaluation of the ITS Corridor projects of the CEF program, already covering almost all of the CNCs, shows that the specific systems implemented are effective and have a good ROI. Being just a limited subset of what is, or has been implemented nationally, the absolute figures presented in the book therefore may be significantly higher for all of Europe. In future programs, with higher levels of harmonization and integration and an ever-increasing level of digitalization the contribution to European and national policy goals will be substantial.