Those who know me are fully aware of my strong belief that traffic management is the mother to all solutions in transport. Sometimes we laugh with how this creeps up in all our discussions with the Innovation and Deployment team is ERTICO-ITS Europe or out of the office, when I attend meetings on Connected and Automated Driving or Urban mobility.

Co-Chairing with Klaas Rozema (Dynniq) and closely working with traffic management experts such as Gino Franco (Swarco), Jeroen Brower (TomTom), Martin Russ (Austriatech) and of course Pedro Barradas (Armis ITS) and Jop Spoelstra (Technolution) on the TM 2.0 ERTICO Innovation Platform for the past 6 years, I had the opportunity to share my enthusiasm with like-minded colleagues from various stakeholder groups who also believe in the solutions power of Traffic Management.

Traffic management 2.0

Nonetheless, we (and I speak on behalf of all of them), do not refer to just any traffic management practice or scheme. When we refer to the mother of all solutions traffic, we have in mind the interactive cooperative traffic management as set and agreed in the TM 2.0 ERTICO Innovation Platform (www.tm20.org). The latter, now numbers 40 member organisations, including Ministries and Service providers and motorway operators who see value in cooperating and co-opetiting (cooperatively competing) with their peers and others coming from both the private and public sector, towards ensuring a more informed traffic management on both sides. A traffic management which does not only see the priorities of the public, as important to satisfy, but also those of the private stakeholders. One that aims at respecting the business case of time efficient routing while also respecting and adhering to the access limitations of the geo-fenced areas that the public authorities have unilaterally set.

If traffic management is all about planning and control of road traffic, through it’s 2.0 evolution (in TM 2.0), it now includes dialogue and cooperation of stakeholders, exchange of stakeholders information on priorities, mutual respect and understanding of private and public sector business plans and more. Co-opetition is nothing else than the cooperation of competitors for the common good. The latter is bound to be set by the public authorities, as the private sector will most certainly prioritise on revenue only if they do not cooperate towards the common good.

TM 2.0 has encultured the need of commitment in striving for a common goal, that of alleviating traffic. It is common knowledge that if service providers send their users towards direction A via the same main route that looks in their monitors (and FCD-fed calculations of their fusion engines) as free-flowing, without any concern towards the bigger picture, that street or highway will become clogged and congested very-very soon. On the contrary, if competing service providers and the public authority planning and regulating traffic sit around the table and plan together, they can share the commonly agreed plan for the various scenarios that may come up and they will be able to instruct their users towards following diverse routings that aim to balance the road network at all times. We are talking about the passenger traffic and freight traffic too. The TM 2.0 concept is being tested in the SOCRATES 2.0 project, a CEF (Cohesion European Facility) funded line project, led by the Dutch Ministry with the cooperation of Germany, Belgium and Denmark. The results are very promising (https://socrates2.org/).

Multimodality and traffic management

But let me come to the point. Is co-petition in Traffic management enough to solve all problems traffic? Yes. The cooperation of stakeholders and their action taken on the basis that there is a common goal that goes beyond the individual profit of the private stakeholders when need be (incidents, safety related information and geofencing), is key. However (and there is always a ‘however’ in the ‘yes’), traffic management is not only about road and vehicles. People and freight nowadays do not only move on road. People and freight move on water, air and rail. What about these mobility modes? What about micromobility (scooters, bicycles and electric skateboards and lightweight devices that move below