Industry News
EC to spend £1.36bn on intelligent transport over next seven years
7th June 2007
Jacques Barrot, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of Transport addressed an "e-safety Conference" in Berlin on Tuesday, and told delegates that a roughly €2bn (£1.36bn) share of the European Research and the trans-European Transport Network budgets for the period 2007 -2013 will be devoted to intelligent transport.
M. Barrot intends to present a Green Paper in September on urban transport which will also look at ITS solutions such as interoperable tolling systems to optimise use of infrastructure in towns. He will also present a Logistics action plan in October. Part of this plan will be devoted to e-freight and the use of smart technologies.
Referring to the GALILEO European satellite navigation system, the Commissioner foresaw that it will help different technologies to converge, such as satellite-based systems and mobile communications used in on-board driver assistance and road charging applications; EU standards would have to assure that these applications are interoperable. M. Barrot said considerable work to achieve interoperability is going on in the domains of traffic information, electronic toll collection and in several eSafety applications such as eCall. (Germany and Austria signed the eCall protocol at the Berlin conference, bringing the number of EU Member States signatories to 12.)
The Commission has already initiated collaborative initiatives such as the eSafety and the Intelligent Car Initiative, which form part of a wider European strategy to reduce the number of road deaths by half by 2010.
Referring to the safe use of new collision avoidance technologies in cars, M. Barrot said the Commission had updated a Recommendation on a European Statement of Principles on Human-Machine Interaction. As the role of the driver is changing with the new advanced in-car technologies, M. Barrot said the EU should investigate whether the existing legal framework and education methods for drivers need to be revisited.
He also wished that advanced safety features would filter through to mass-market cars faster than they have done so far: “It is essential to focus on bringing effective solutions to market quickly; at present most of the available active safety functions are confined to 'prestige' cars,” M. Barrot noted, adding, “We need a policy push to make them available more widely, this is in particular true for electronic stability control.”
This may involve raising consumer awareness as well as persuading manufacturers of the need; the Commission recently supported an eSafetyAware campaign led by the FIA on Electronic Stability Control, launched in May.
News Headlines
