In the densely populated area of North Western Europe, five countries joined forces to implement ITS strategies to enhance the quality of international services in traffic and transport. This was achieved mainly by implementing regional traffic Information centres, cross border traffic management schemes and international rerouting corridors. The five countries are Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Germany and France. The efforts are carried out under the acronym of CENTRICO and is supported by the European Commission. In this paper, the objectives of this work are described. The paper covers the milestones like the erection of Transport Information and Control Systems (TICS) in the various countries, the way the TICS are communicating internationally, and the implementation of the various traffic management corridors. One corridor, Eindhoven (Nl) - Koln (G), the first international rerouting corridor in Europe, is in operation now. The paper also touches briefly on other ITS items in this area like electronic fee collection (EFC) and ITS application in conurbation areas. Overall conclusions and lessons learned from international co-operation and implementation on ITS finish the paper. (A*)
Abstract