DG TREN's Fotis Karamitsos, on why the European Commission's new ITS Action Plan is looking to the past for future direction
The
In fact, says Fotis Karamitsos, Director, Maritime Transport, Galileo and Intelligent Transport within the EC's Directorate-General Transport and Energy (DG TREN), the wording reflects the increasing importance of the environment on the
"Safety remains at the forefront of what we do. The EU has a target of reducing by 50 per cent by the end of the decade the number of casualties on its roads. That means a reduction from 50,000 to 25,000 annually. We're now at just under 40,000.
"The 2003 European Road Safety Action Programme had its mid-term review in 2006 but there are other things going on in parallel, such as the 2008 Directive on cross-border enforcement of traffic offences - a delicate issue, and one which hasn't been fully agreed yet - and the Commission proposal which foresees mandatory fitting of the following safety features: tyre pressure monitoring systems on passenger cars, electronic stability control systems on all vehicles and advanced emergency braking systems and lane departure warning systems on heavy-duty vehicles.
"Based on impact assessments which we've carried out, we expect these moves to reduce casualties by a further 5,000 per annum. It's fair to say that we've done a lot. But we could do more.
"Nevertheless, in the last few months energy and environmental issues have grown in political priority and it was appropriate to include them in the Action Plan. The proposal is as always: that solutions and deployments should address all major issues."
Environmental potential
"There is significant potential for ITS to be used to tackle environmental issues," Karamitsos continues, "whether it be in the form of Electronic Fee Collection [EFC], integrated local transport strategies such as those developed and promoted by POLIS, or developing in-vehicle instrument clusters which show energy consumption and encourage more environmentally aware driving." A big step within the Action Plan will be the creation of a multimodal journey planner; more effective use of existing infrastructure can, it has been estimated, bring about pollution reductions of between 5-15 per cent. Some studies put that figure at as high as 25 per cent, if very comprehensive measures - including reducing car traffic - are taken.Karamitsos stresses that ITS is merely an enabling tool, that it is for effective policy instruments to take the technology and utilise its capabilities. He doesn't agree with criticisms that the sudden shift towards the environment leaves manufacturers and others scrabbling for a business case.
"You have to combine the environment with energy consumption," he explains. "For the consumer, it all comes down to what comes out of his or her pocket. Improving urban parking information is an example of how energy can be saved, as is the nomadic device which can carry up-to-date information on traffic conditions, thus providing routing choices, and can be taken from the vehicle and continue to provide information on other modes.
"Between 2006 and 2020, we expect road freight traffic to increase by 55 per cent and passenger traffic by 36 per cent. That's another 40 million vehicles on the roads over that time. The size of the environmental problem is considerable and it's important to include ITS in policy from the start, not to just use it as a fire-fighting tool."
The 'common' market
Despite the significant efforts within EC projects in recent years to encourage harmonisation and standardisation, the EU's roads still suffer from technological fragmentation. With 45 per cent of all freight moving by road there is a real need to fight congestion more effectively. There is a perception at the Commission level that other modes of transport have managed to achieve greater interoperability. This is in part a product of roads' fundamental nature - the networks are very much more widely spread, and they tend to have many more stakeholders involved and many private users who simply travel when they fancy.Another problem is that ITS/telematics has often been used by industry stakeholders to promote their own, often selfish interests. The automotive companies, for example, have tended to use ITS as a marketing tool. The tolling sector has also pursued its own agenda to a degree. The solution, says Karamitsos, is greater public sector involvement and the use of ITS to achieve transport policy objectives.
That might alarm free market proponents but it is in fact a pragmatic response to the ITS sector's historical shortcomings, he says: "We've been criticised in recent years for taking too broad an approach to research and development. By involving the public sector, tapping into its views of what's really necessary and looking to concentrate on a relatively small number of areas of interest, we're looking to get away from the 'toys for the boys' mentality which has been so prevalent of late. We want quick results which will allow an add-on approach to develop. So, a priority, for example, is to set up information services which are truly pan-European and get us away from island solutions.
"We need 'overall' solutions, something which EasyWay, the follow-on to the Euro-Regional Projects, has been looking to address by developing guidelines for operations. EasyWay will continue to do this in concert with the Action Plan." By 2013, EasyWay will look to have developed strategies and deploy the pan-European solutions for traffic information, traffic management and freight and logistics. With some €1.5bn of funding from the EC and Member States' national authorities, it will look at how to harmonise and deploy solutions on the Trans-European Road Network (TERN) and then expand that work onto the secondary road network and into urban areas.
Accelerating standards
Another innovation, the institution of which will be put before the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament for approval before the end of the summer, is a new ITS Regulatory Committee. This will allow a much tighter rein to be kept on the timescales for standards definition.Karamitsos: "Today, we operate by giving a mandate to
Firming up on timing
The Action Plan concentrates on six key areas (see Sidebar, 'Priority areas for action'). It gives the 'what' and 'when' of what is supposed to happen. It also proposes the 'how' via the proposed legal instrument. In this vein, another important move is the very real prospect of more developments becoming mandatory."This opens the way for a move from voluntary agreements to legally obliging instruments," Karamitsos says. "That may not be universally popular but if we look at other transport modes we can see that obligation has driven things there.
"In terms of an overall architecture, a high-level advisory group of 20-30 people, including executives from the automotive, telecommunications, road operators and freight sectors will come together to look at how we improve public-private interaction.
"As well as obliging the public sector to provide data to the private sector, greater modal interaction will be encouraged. That means getting the railways, the airlines and so onboard. For freight, for example, it means linking the ports to other freight providers. eFreight will allow the use of alternative modes - and that cuts both ways, allowing other modes access to road capacity. The aim is to allow greater choice."
Top-down, focused
This 'back to basics' ethos will result in a top-down approach being applied. The idea is to get back to the days of programmes such as DRIVE and PROMETHEUS which had discrete, well-defined goals."Over the last 10 years, we've found ourselves promoting lots of industry initiatives," Karamitsos continues. "This model has reached the end of its usefulness. Now we need to go back to another approach, to look at how to tie these things together with the public sector taking the leading role and prioritising policy. If we don't do that, we don't get the benefits. It's also a question of approach: do we build new capacity, or would it be preferable to improve the utilisation of what we already have? "If we can have all hubs using the same protocols and so on we'll go a long way towards achieving the latter. That means a lot of investment in Member States but by looking at what other modes have done we can leapfrog, not learn from scratch, in the same way that some countries have done with GSM network deployments.
"The new Action Plan marks a departure in many ways. It's the first time, for instance, that we've had five sections of the Commission - DGs TREN, INFSO, Enterprise, RTD and Environment - involved. It'd be nice to conclude the setting up of such entities as the ITS Regulatory Committee by the time of the
Priority areas for action:
The ITS Action Plan lists six priority areas for action; these are:
Optimal use of road, traffic and travel data
Procedures will be defined for: the provision of EU-wide real-time traffic and travel information services; how the public and private sectors will interact; guaranteed access to information on a fair and equitable basis. Collection and provision of road data will be optimised; this will include traffic circulation plans and route recommendations (in particular for heavy goods vehicles). The timely availability of public data for digital maps will be ensured. Free provision of minimum universal traffic information services will be defined and the development of national multimodal door-to-door journey planners will be promoted.
Continuity of traffic and freight management ITS services on transport corridors and in conurbations
Common procedures and specifications will be defined to ensure the continuity of ITS services for passengers and freight in transport corridors and urban/interurban regions. ITS services to be deployed in support of eFreight will be identified. Wider deployment of an updated, multimodal European ITS Framework architecture will be supported, as will interoperability of electronic road tolling systems.
Road safety and security
Promotion of deployment of advanced driver assistance systems in both new-build vehicles and retrofits; support for the harmonised introduction of eCall; a regulatory framework for safe onboard human-machine interface for nomadic devices; ITS applications and services for vulnerable road users; secure parking for commercial vehicles and telematics-controlled parking and reservation systems.
Integration of the vehicle into the transport infrastructure
Adoption of an open in-vehicle platform architecture for ITS services and applications; development and evaluation of cooperative systems, specifications definition for all permutations of communication between infrastructure and vehicles; definition of a mandate for the European Standardisation Organisations to develop harmonised standards relating to cooperative systems.
Data security and protection, and liability issues
Assess the security and data protection issues relating to data handling for ITS applications; assess the liability issues pertaining to applications and notably in-vehicle safety systems.@@ European ITS cooperation and coordination Proposal for a legal framework; development of a decision-support toolkit; development of guidelines for public funding; the setting-up of a specific ITS collaboration platform between Member States and regional/local governments to promote urban mobility initiatives.
