Driving smart

Caroline Visser of the International Road Federation details the benefits intelligent transportation systems can bring, both for travelers and the environment

“The technology is there and it's ever-evolving”
-Caroline Visser

Throughout the developed world good surface transportation networks have allowed for the mobility of people and goods, which has in turn led to improved national economic performance, industry productivity growth and international competitiveness.

However, continuing to build ever more highway infrastructure does have numerous undesirable side effects such as environmental impacts, energy consumption, land use, congestion and not to mention the vast sums of money required to build this infrastructure.

Growing concerns about the impact of these side effects have led countries like the US to move away from such infrastructure-intensive, capital-intensive transportation strategies, toward more integrated transport policies, which strengthen transport infrastructure through technology.

Many are now looking to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the benefits that they can bring. For the US, ITS provide a way of maximizing a road network that is on the brink of reaching capacity.

"From a congestion and efficiency standpoint, I would say that managing a road network today without an ITS infrastructure is unimaginable," suggests Caroline Visser, Road Finance and ITS Programme Manager for the International Road Federation. "For road operators, it's a really vital tool and there are so many different ITS applications now - from monitoring and data collection solutions to see what's happening on the road, to options to guide traffic through dynamic signalling and travel information - that agencies can really tailor the solution to meet their specific needs. I would say that road operators today are very much dependent on ITS for not only congestion management and demand management, but also road safety."

For Visser, research into the technologies themselves is no longer the main problem. She believes ITS technology is now at the stage where it can get the required results - provided the systems are implemented correctly. "It's more about taking research results and making them deployable on a large scale," she explains. "Today we're at the stage that it's more the implementation side that seems to be hampered."

To address this concern, Visser's team has set up an IRF working group dedicated to transport policies and their relationship with ITS. "Our feeling was that the positive impacts of ITS are sometimes overlooked. ITS is somewhat lacking in visibility, and it's not usually a very sexy topic with politicians. So what we have tried to do with this working group is raise the profile of ITS with the high-level decision-makers - ministers, transport secretaries and their immediate advisors, the high-level civil servants responsible people for policy decisions - firstly to generate enough budget for ITS research, but also to explain the benefits of ITS. We want to demystify it. ITS has a technology label attached to it, which can frighten some people, but in actual fact it's a really wide-ranging concept. There are so many applications and technologies that are encompassed in that single acronym. The technology is there, and it's ever-evolving, so that shouldn't be our main worry - raising awareness is now the key."

And this is the core role of the IRF as a federation: to bring together stakeholders from all sides of the road development spectrum, from government ministries to transport agencies, from planning departments to environmental parties. Its work encompasses the financing of roads, network optimisation, environmental concerns and road safety - as well as ITS, of course. "Our mandate is to organise knowledge management activities and share best practice among our members," says Visser. "We work closely together with the network of national ITS associations and are also open to representatives from international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, who are now embarking on a number of ITS initiatives from standardisation perspective. We have close contact with the European Commission. So it is the IRF that brings together all these different stakeholders to exchange best practices and share their knowledge."

Whilst enabling more effective use of the road network itself, there is another area in which ITS can play a key role: that of promoting a green and more sustainable use of the road network. "Road transport doesn't have a very good image in this regard," acknowledges Visser. "It contributes to 74 percent of all transport CO2 emissions. Nonetheless, many of our members are embarking, on a voluntary basis, on initiatives to reduce their own carbon footprint and to come up with innovations to make road construction, maintenance and operation greener. We have several initiatives within the IRF itself. We're developing a greenhouse gas calculator, which is an instrument that monitors emissions during the lifecycle of a road, and it is a tool that will enable members to calculate their emissions. ITS is helping because we think that traffic management and congestion reduction - in which ITS plays a big role - is a very important way to make roads and road transport more efficient and sustainable. Traffic management systems combined with emissions monitoring have a high potential in contributing to this. Also, to a certain extent, road-user charging has a part to play as it rationalises the mobility demand. It will not be a miracle solution for addressing transport growth, for example, but it might do something. For instance, it's been proven in Stockholm, where they introduced user charging in the city a few years ago, that there have been substantial gains in reducing emissions."

Encouraging a more sustainable approach to transportation is a key part of the IRF's philosophy, particularly given rising traffic volumes, but despite the huge strides taken in recent years it remains a significant challenge. "We have not succeeded in decoupling economic growth from growth in transport demand, and we have to look at realistic options to handle this growth in transport demand," concludes Visser. "Rather than just extending roads to accommodate this growth, we need to look more to software and mobility management in order to get the required efficiency gains. From our point of view, this will have a great impact on policy decisions because it will be all about the efficiency of the transport networks in place. ITS and traffic management can contribute to that, but maybe it is only part of the solution."