With the increasing desire for mobility, cities and regions are being faced with even greater challenges on how to deal with the issues of congestion, safety, environment and air quality, and accessibility. With space and finance at a premium, local authorities cannot afford to build new highway infrastructure and have had to turn to the opportunities presented by emerging technologies and telecommunications to manage the transport network effectively and with an holistic approach to the problems being faced. Cities and regions have well developed objectives to support and achieve their policy goals. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) have developed to the extent that they can now be considered as a core element of a city or region's integrated transport toolkit. Individually, many of the techniques/systems that ITS can deliver have proven benefits but it is when they are used in an integrated way that the main benefits are obtained. ITS applications now have the capabilities to help relieve congestion, give safety benefits, encourage modal shift to passenger transport, improve freight / goods delivery and movement, and reduce the impact of transport on the environment ITS gives cities and regions a flexible approach to delivering their policy goals in whatever form is required. Partnership and inter organisation (public and private sector) working enhances the benefits that can be achieved. However, cities and regions alone cannot develop the technological solutions to meet the policy objectives and therefore research and development offers an opportunity for local authorities to work with the private sector to jointly develop and evaluate these solutions to the benefit of all parties. The paper will describe how research and development can be applied to deliver the transport and policy objectives that have been set for a region where the urban conurbations are smaller than the major cities accross Europe. It will describe the policy context in which applications can be utilised, where interagency / public / private sector cooperation can add value and highlight where there are still areas that need to be developed to achieve the maximum effectiveness from ITS (A). Only abstract (as above) is available from the conference proceedings. For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E212343.
Samenvatting