Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems (IVSS) are seen as having tremendous potential for reducing road fatalities, which were over 40,000 in 2005 in the EU. ICT systems such as ABS, cruise control, adaptive cruise control and electronic stability control (ESC) have been on the market for years, in some cases decades. The uptake of these systems varies; ESC has had a relatively quick uptake and now is present in approximately 40% of vehicles on the road. ACC on the other hand is installed on less than 1% of vehicles. To achieve safety goals, more vehicles need to be equipped. The deployment of the systems should be accelerated. To accelerate deployment, stakeholders such as road authorities, policy makers and industry want to know which systems should be chosen to be accelerated, and why?. What are the benefits? Who do they benefit? Who should promote them, and how? Different stakeholders have different emphases. The eIMPACT project, "Socio-economic Impact Assessment of Stand-alone and Co-operative Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems (IVSS) in Europe", addresses the need to quantify the effects of the systems in order to support decison-making about research, investments, deployment incentives, etc. eIMPACT is part of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for Information Society Technologies and Media. The project carried out impact assessments of twelve stand-alone and cooperative systems at the EU level, for 2010 and 2020. For each of these two future years, a scenario with a low penetration rate, reflecting no incentives to accelerate deployment, and a high penetration rate, including policy incentives for system deployment, was analysed. Outputs include safety impacts in terms of reductions in fatalities, injuries and accidents, traffic effects in terms of direct (traffic flow) and indirect (reduction in congestion) effects, and the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for the twelve systems. The CBA was extended by a stakeholder analysis, examining the costs and benefits incurred by users, industry and public authorities. Finally, policy options and strategies were explored for deployment strategies of IVSS. (Author/publisher)
Abstract