Align transport infrastructure needs with ITS offerings

Kallistratos Dionelis, General Secretary of 486 ASECAP, ponders the absence of creativity and innovation in the road management sector. 'Traditional' road managers and ITS specialists share many of the same ultimate goals and yet, he says, a common understanding of what technology can achieve is still conspicuously absent.

It is always interesting to manage our bearings in a complex and ever-changing world. Something which we need to manage more carefully is the juxtaposition of traditional attitudes within the road management sector and the more innovative thinking with the ITS sector.

The economy is all about wealth creation, and over the years we have seen the foundations of the global economy shift from physical capital (tangible assets) to intellectual capital (technical expertise) to creative capital (imagination and passion). This has major implications for individuals, organisations, communities and, indeed, whole nations.

Creative entities share a strong desire for structures and technologies which will allow them to continue to innovate and which will both value their input and challenge them. These creative structures are needed in an ITS world with mechanisms for mobilising resources around visions and which are receptive to both small changes and the occasional 'big' idea. The present and future intelligent transport systems must be led by personalities - senior managers capable of identifying and prioritising measures to support wide-scale deployment, taking into account the relevant technological, political and financial challenges. We urgently need intelligent managers and policy-makers who have in common a "readiness to deal with risk". These people are the guardians of the system and should be appropriately rewarded and penalised according to the decisions they take. We need their daring strategic initiatives in order to accelerate or overcome the pitfalls of ITS deployment in support of the policy objectives of clean, safe and efficient transport.

Moving on from R&D

It is up to corporate and government strategists to exploit the potential of green ITS. Such solutions are highly relevant to society given the rise in energy prices and ongoing discussions about climate change. Awareness must be raised among 'transport producers' (providers of transport services) and 'transport consumers' (the users) of their responsibility with regard to saving energy through the use of more efficient technologies and better transport management. To achieve all these aims, a regulatory framework is necessary. A framework must include incentives and penalties, bearing in mind that green and efficient ITS is not just about cutting energy costs but is mainly about helping individuals to achieve mobility while assisting society to decouple energy consumption (environmental requirements) from economic growth.

I recently received an invitation to the 16th 6456 ITS World Congress, the theme of which will be the role of ITS in daily life and how ITS can improve mobility. Over 1,300 papers have been submitted for the conference sessions from Europe, Asia and the Americas. The papers seem to cover every topic imaginable, including data gathering and processing, traveller information, in-vehicle ITS, traffic management, payment systems, safety, energy efficiency, ITS impacts, costs, benefits and so on. In brief, there is the opportunity to experience a theoretical solution to every possible problem of the real world.

My immediate reaction as a transport professional was to question whether it is in fact so difficult to recognise that the time for detailed theoretical ITS analysis has passed. Do we really need all these documents? Can't we turn the page and move from research to deployment? Can we really consider ITS as an efficient instrument of action or will ITS remain in our minds as a panacea? ITS does not need any more all these rather inflationary collections of uncoordinated action plans, objectives, missions and visions; instead a simple and realistic set of strategic initiatives is necessary to remove barriers and lead us to effective, wide-scale deployments that will take into account regional priorities, differences in technologies' levels of maturity, and (perhaps most important) the road sector's willingness to cooperate and invest.

Cooperative systems are a very fashionable topic among ITS experts and thousands of pages have been written on such systems' role in establishing and developing a triangular scheme of interoperability among intelligent vehicles, infrastructure and drivers. It is not simply a case of investing in robotic vehicles, however.

As noted above, 'ITS' means having strong managers ready to make measured choices from amongst many possible alternatives and apply the results in a system which is prepared to adjust to the 'unexpected'. ITS is an efficient tool with which to improve mobility provided that all stakeholders recognise that the end target is better 'daily accessibility'. Mobility is the means not the goal.

Back to basics

"War is father of all" my Greek forebears used to say, so it is not surprising that defense departments in big states already work on constructing 'intelligent' vehicles to be used as parts of unmanned convoys through war zones. Before long, in the civilian sector, there will be vehicles capable of transporting us in an environment where they and not we will be fully in control. Cars will be smarter, safer and cleaner, just by themselves. Experts already work to build such vehicles but as long as traffic conditions do not change radically can we expect to see such technological marvels become reality? ITS technologies will boom but the question remains: how will this boom coexist with the active role of the driver, the individual with final responsibility for any driving decision taken? I recall an interesting discussion between representatives of workers in the rail sector and in the road domain. When the rail representative focused on rail's automated elements and how much safer an environment they create for the rail sector, the representative of the road sector just said: "You have a point there but please don't forget that we in the road sector have something in the car called a steering wheel."

The roads infrastructure industry's planners are by tradition rational. Today's road operators are by and large not set up for innovation (at least by comparison with the speed and innovation of the other ITS stakeholders). Our road infrastructure systems are oriented toward incremental improvements, examining thoroughly and doing better what they are doing already. In the road sector, advocates of bold and ambitious strategies are always welcome but for practical reasons they often find themselves on the sidelines, labeled as risk lovers, while the rewards tend to go to those more skilled at working within the matrix of parameters defining prudence. The road infrastructure industry narrows down many ITS scenarios and proposals and likes to identify and determine every critical issue and measure all the hidden risks.

An un-enabled tool?

ITS is the tool which can make the complexities of business a lot simpler. Advances in ITS technologies can lead to new ways of increasing business efficiency. ITS should represent a culmination of all, collective experience, thinking and professional development in a cooperative business environment. At its core the infrastructure management business needs to align what the transport domain really needs with what ITS providers and enablers can understand and build. A serious problem is that in ITS almost every party has its own list of compliance requirements for transforming resources into services. This transformation is how business works. The more the stakeholders involved cooperate among themselves to this transformation, the more successfully we create 'transport value'.

ITS is a way of sifting masses of business data in real time to enable information to be discovered and analysed and thus better transport decisions to be made. This refers to both sides of the transport economy: how to 'produce' a transport product, (build and safeguard the cooperation of more intelligent cars and roads) and how to 'consume' this transport product (have more intelligent drivers). The case is really hard to make on the 'production' side where all too often there is a wall at the highest levels between the information/technology department and every other within a company. To put it simply: top executives at most sectors and companies fail to recognise every aspect of the value of ITS technologies. In the transport infrastructure sector ITS can help companies to transform data (from their operations, business partners and markets) into useful competitive and socially friendly transport information. It is clear that ITS is the source of profitable innovations. But road managers are cautious and slow, keen to avoid wrong decisions and money 'wasted' on projects which fail to achieve the desired goals.

There is a difficulty in managing properly the fast-changing intelligent transport systems in the transport sector when there are such differences in mindset between management and ITS staff. There are permanent 'language' differences that are to be added to the inherent difficulty of a rather 'conventional' road infrastructure sector when managing rapidly changing ITS technologies. If we are to succeed as a transport domain in the new knowledge economy we must give ITS youngsters a certain role in the strategic management process. Interaction between technology-driven ITS personnel and managers (who mostly deal in the big picture and grey areas) is crucial if we hope to finally have the ITS world understood, appreciated and profitable. ITS people use jargons and acronyms unknown to those outside their immediate circle. 'Conventional' executives speak the language of business fully understood by everyone. Much is lost in translation and it is the ITS world which is blamed for this. Of course the reality today is changing and CEOs who ignore ITS are destined to fail. Technology has accelerated the pace of change in business, making it crucial for all in the boardroom to respond to every opportunity (or threat) as quickly and as effectively as possible.

The time has arrived for an intelligent, green revolution in the transport sector. The aim remains the same: how to cope with more and more traffic and satisfy more drivers on the same amount of inelastic infrastructure. The European Union now has 27 members; China and India are getting richer. In the past the transport system was designed to serve the rich, now it must serve all. So, in every future scenario the 'middle classes' (an increasingly archaic term) will want more cars, more traffic opportunities and more comforts, all of them accompanied by tax reductions, lower CO2 emissions and less congestion. It is an awkward equation.

Change is needed. But change comes with the agents of change. Where are they?