General News: EC consults stakeholders on ITS Action Plan

Date: 28 March 2008

On 26 March 2008, the EC organised a public consultation workshop in order to collect stakeholders’ views on an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) Action Plan in preparation.
The Action Plan recognises the role that Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can play to deliver clean, efficient and safe and secure road transport. It aims to create a consistent and comprehensive policy framework to unlock the full potential of ITS in serving European and national policies. A draft discussion paper has already been released stressing a number of proposed areas of action.

Enhanced road safety and security was pinpointed as one of the three key themes requiring action. Various eSafety topics were addressed, such as making better use of newest active safety systems such as ESC, ACC, or eCall, improve human machine interface and the crucial need to study the potential of cooperative systems.

Greener transport, decreasing congestion and reducing energy consumption was also one of the major themes to be tackled by the Action Plan. Key elements discussed included traffic management systems to improve efficiency of travel journeys.

ITS can also plays a crucial role in the mobility problem. This is the third theme addressed by the draft Action Plan. If Europe wants to achieve better mobility of people and goods, efforts should be done in providing more reliable real-time traffic and travel information and improving the efficiency of logistic chains (e-Freight). The consultation workshop brought forward some framework for discussion on the various themes and highlighted the strategic importance to assess the impact which ITS applications will have in the real life of the citizen.

Various European policy instruments were reviewed, which could be used to create synergies and allow ITS to contribute with its full potential to policy goals. These include financial support, through via existing programmes, standardisation, legislative measures and other soft measures.

As a result of this consultation process, the EC will propose a number of policy actions to accelerate deployment of ITS applications. The Commission is planning to release a communication mid July this year.

Visit the European Commission website for more information about the ITS Action Plan