Advanced Transport Telematics (ATT), which sometimes is confused in the road mobility sector with on-board vehicle electronics, is a potent tool to help in solving today's main problems of mobility: congestion, safety, environmental impact, user's comfort. R&D efforts have been going on for 10 years in Europe both at European Community level (DRIVE, THERMIE, and other Programmes), at international level (EUREKA Programme) and at national/local/company level. Similar activities are going on in Japan (RACS, AMTICS and, more recently, VICS, ARTS, SSVS, PSV Programmes). More recently, from 1991, the IVHS Programme has been launched in the USA. After such huge R&D effort it could be expected that ATT technology, which has been successfully developed, would quickly come into widespread use in Europe. This is not yet the case. The paper tries to identify the main reasons for this relatively slow deployment of a successful R&D effort. The main bottleneck seems to be that ATT implementation, especially in the road mobility sector, involves many actors (automotive industry, electronic industry, telecommunication industry and operators, infrastructure providers and operators, Public Authorities, users) who previously were not accustomed to operate in a co-ordinated way. This may lead to uncoordinated implementation of ATT in the search for the short-term benefits it could give to some actors, but leaving the basic problems of road mobility and customer's needs unsolved. A lot of "fresh thinking" outside the pure R&D field is needed. In the European context, ERTICO is an attempt to achieve this new approach to the implementation of a totally new, unconventional technology. Results from ERTICO's experience in the past year are given to help understand the underlying nature of the problem. (A)
Abstract