Metropolitan Bilbao is threatened by major road incidents impacting not only on its people and its economy, but on the long distance traffic serving Spain's Northern road corridor. Presently, traffic growth exceeds 7% in spite of the recent opening of a State-of-the-Art underground Metro system. ITS appeared as an essential tool to manage the system at a time when it was more and more evident that we could not build our way out of this growing congestion. In this context, ITS has been envisioned as (a) a remedial program to achieve short term increases in highway capacity, (b) new policy approaches based on a set of indicators portraying the effectiveness and efficiency of each transport mode, (c) a process to establish a more global vision of the overall transport system, and (d) an ideal platform to involve the private initiative under a win-win scheme. This holistic approach has been rendered possible thanks to a unique public-private partnership created in 1997 around the "Access Bilbao 2010" Roundtable, having as active agents not only different levels of the Public Administration sector but also many private firms. Several lessons result from this ongoing process which could be of interest for other European cities. One certainty to be kept in mind is the call for "early winners", new and perhaps modest implementations that nonetheless do a job, are widely used and prove the principle. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114174.
Abstract