An article about the potential of ITS to improve life in the city has been published in the HERE blog. Below you will find a fragment of the text prepared by Sarah Durante based on an interview with ERTICO’s CEO Hermann Meyer:
ITS is the application of information and communication technologies to road transport that help improve safety, efficiency and minimize environmental impact. ITS encompasses everything from automated traffic lights to traveler information technologies like real-time traffic data.
While there are already many uses of ITS across Europe, fragmentation exists. This is where organizations like Ertico come in. Ertico is a public/private partnership of more than 100 companies and organizations from across different sectors, such as mobile network operators, public authorities, research institutions and vehicle manufacturers, working together to make ITS a reality in Europe.
“Even though ITS can be considered as one component of a smart city alongside smart energy and smart home, it might be the most important with the greatest opportunity to positively impact city life,” says Hermann Meyer, Chief Executive Officer at Ertico. “To be concrete, implementations of ITS are estimated to reduce fatalities by 30 per-cent and reduce congestion by 15 per-cent in the next five years alone.”
Today traffic management centers rely on information coming from sensors or cameras that are fixed to the road to detect incidents and other events helping them re-route and manage traffic. Meyer sees a future where these centers will get the information directly from sensors in the vehicle providing even more accurate, real-time information so that traffic centers can even predict where congestion will occur and proactively take action to minimize it in advance.
In addition to the organization’s activities coordinating ITS projects with its members, of which HERE is counted, and advocacy with the European Parliament, Ertico is also busy planning the annual ITS World Congress. This fall’s congress to be held in Bordeaux is all about “Intelligent Mobility – Better Use of Space.”
“At this year’s congress we want to demonstrate how cities can use legacy infrastructure in the smartest way,” elaborates Meyer. “We realize that ITS will be a step-change for many established cities where they will need to layer these new technologies as seamlessly as possible into sometimes centuries old street networks and infrastructure, rather than making massive infrastructure changes all at once.”
To read the full article, visit the HERE Blog
