May-June 2022 ERTICO annual meeting – Toulouse, France
Written by Dr. Moshe Becker
ERTICO is the European umbrella organization connecting together 21 European nations for ITS activity, bringing together government, and business partners from around Europe.
This year’s annual meeting of the ERTICO, was held in Toulouse, France.
The framework was similar to that of the ITS global conferences, and it marked the end of the Corona epidemic. 3000 participants from 30 countries, 100 lecture and discussion sessions spread over four days with around 250 lectures, an exhibition with 80 booths and exhibitors, and demonstration areas for startups and vehicles with varying degrees of autonomy.
The conference focused on four primary topics: (1) ITS as a service for citizens, (2) new ITS application solutions, (3) green and sustainable mobility, and (4) the shift from large-scale ITS experiments to the deployment of ITS solutions in metropolitan and international networks.
It was tough work to select from the many lectures and discussions that took place, so I will concentrate on the insight I gained that are relevant to the growth of ITS in Israeli reality:
(a) MaaS as a mobility service as a transportation concept is not developing as desired: the required transitions between different modes of transportation, the problem of the “first and last mile” in making a trip, and the use of public behavioral sciences to shift it from private to public vehicles are all lacking.
(b) The development of presenting innovative solutions focused on connectivity and databases on the expansion of the use of the vehicle that enables automatic driving. The challenge of developing common standards, the accuracy of data, and the complexity of coordinating between new generation connected vehicles in traffic flow and normal non-connected vehicles in traffic flow were all underlined. This problem will take a long time to overcome, especially given the dangers of road accidents.
(c) Despite the introduction of an electric vehicle as a process that may have an impact on air quality, the problematic nature of the introduction of MaaS related to giving preference to such a vehicle resulted in only 12% of vehicle owners agreeing to abandon their private vehicle in favor of public transportation. Even teaching drivers to reduce air pollution in a conventional car is a complicated subject with no immediate implementation.
(d) The transfer from large-scale pilots to full implementation on a metropolitan and international scale remains challenging due to the difficulty in defining the scale of transportation systems to assure uniformity and accuracy of information for systemic coordination of safe traffic flow. It appears that there is still a long way to go before complete solutions are developed. Every significant accident slows the development of autonomous ITS systems.
Tourist and professional note: Toulouse is a practical example of transportation ITS applications at the metropolitan level, as well as a beautiful city and region for tourism. The next ERTICO annual conference will be held May 22-24, 2023, in Lisbon, Portugal.