Six road authorities from four countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands), five international traffic information and service providers, one car manufacturer and two companies for Intelligent Transport Systems have agreed to cooperate to improve national traffic management and traffic information.
New services were developed in 2017 and 2018 for traffic management and traffic information. In 2019 and 2020 these new services were deployed. Tests were done with a test fleet of more than 6,000 road users in the region of Amsterdam with more than 1,000 road users in the regions of Antwerp, Copenhagen and Munich. On 7 July 2017, the European Commission decided to support and co-fund the cooperation and trials.
Services
The services will cover smart routing, actual speed and lane advice, local information and hazardous warnings and improved roadside traffic management measures. Such services will be jointly provided by road authorities, service providers and – in the not-too-distant future – manufacturers of self-driving vehicles. They will be based on a mutual exchange of traffic management data and on a coordination of public roadside traffic management measures and private in-car navigation services
Smoother, safer and more sustainable traffic
The ultimate goal of the new cooperation and data sharing is to achieve new interactive and effective services on traffic management and traffic information. This will lead to smoother, safer and more sustainable traffic. The expectation is that the cooperation will also lead to more business opportunities for the private partners and more cost-effective traffic management for the public authorities. Closer cooperation of all parties involved in road traffic is an important step towards achieving interactive traffic management and self-driving cars.
Partners involved
To enable this, public and private parties will cooperate in SOCRATES 2.0. Participants in the project are: BASt (German Federal Highway Research Institute), Be-Mobile (Flitsmeister), BMW Group, Brand MKRS creative agency (Google Maps, Waze), City of Copenhagen, Flemish Region in Belgium, HERE Technologies, MAPtm, Rijkswaterstaat (representing City of Amsterdam, National Data Warehouse for Traffic Information, Province of Noord-Holland, Transport Authority Amsterdam), Technolution, TomTom Group. The project is co-funded by the European Commission.
