A well-attended Special Interest Session on ‘Deploying Traffic Management 2.0’ at ITS Congress

A Special Interest Session on ‘Deploying Traffic Management 2.0’ at the 12^th European ITS Congress in Strasbourg brought together policy makers, road authorities and service providers to discuss the topic of ‘Transport Network Evolution’.

The overarching aim of Traffic Management is to improve traffic flow to enable safer, cleaner and more efficient road traffic. This has traditionally been the domain of public authorities but the role of private service providers has been increasing steadily and rapidly. How do these groups work in cooperation to provide the best traffic experience to end users? The speakers addressed this question from different perspectives, presenting the concept of the transition to interactive Traffic Management (TM 2.0) and accompanying policy making recommendations.

Martin Dirnwöber from AustriaTech talked about some activities and current framework that, by incorporating TM 2.0 into the country’s Transport Roadmaps, are giving new possibilities to Traffic Management in Austria especially in terms of Mobility as a Service and Connected and Automated Driving. He also stressed the importance of analysing impact (including from the environment) and integrating user data.

Tiffany Vlemmings gave insights into the Socrates 2.0 project, which will be deploying TM 2.0 if it receives EC funding, and its efforts towards overcoming challenges such as users being confronted with various and unsynchronised messages from diverse channels at any one point during their traffic experience.

Peter Morlion from the City of Ghent talked about the importance of a TM scheme that requires minimal resources and can be scalable while at the same time use the TM 2.0 flow of traffic management plans and information along with a strong focus on multimodal and personalised messages for users.

Mark Grefhorst of Be-Mobile spoke of how to ensure that travellers make traffic choices that will optimise the use of the network. Using the paradigm that Socrates 2.0 will be building upon the project’s approval by the EC, he proposed using a mobility cloud database as a middleman to enrich and aggregate information between the back office and the driver.

Richard Harris from HMI Technologies gave insights into how MaaS can unlock the potential of ITS and bridge the gap for the TM 2.0 concept from the perspective of various stakeholders.

The well-attended session was moderated by Johanna Tzanidaki (TomTom). The presentations were followed by a question and answer session.

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