ERTICO CEO Hermann Meyer participated in the public hearing on the White Paper on Transport, which was held on 17 March 2015 at the Transport and Tourism Committee of the European Parliament. Mr Meyer spoke in the first panel discussion, named “Transport and economic growth: promoting job creation, competitiveness, innovation, and developing a modern transport infrastructure across the EU”.
“The mobility challenges in Europe are growing whereas the traditional responses in the context of extending the infrastructure seem to become less attractive because of scarce resources. And in most cities there’s very little space available”- said Mr Meyer- “We need to better organise mobility and Intelligent Transport Systems can make an important contribution to this”.
During his 6 minutes speech, ERTICO’s CEO explained he potential of ITS to reduce road fatalities, traffic congestion and CO2 emissions, as well as to increase transport capacity without the time, cost, land-take and disruption of infrastructure construction. In purely economical terms, ITS is expected to lead to 30 billion US$ in revenue world-wide by 2020.
Mr. Meyer recognised the importance of the White Paper in the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems, as well as the ITS Directive, the ITS Action Plan, Horizon 2020 and the Connecting Europe Facility. However, he pointed at the necessary cooperation between stakeholders to make ITS-related technologies work efficiently by the coordinated management of a key element: data.
Addressing the concerns expressed by an MEP regarding data privacy, Mr Meyer explained that progress has already been made by, for example, anonymising data and reducing the duration of data storage. However, he pointed out that discussions might be needed in order to decide whether these rules should be more flexible in life-or-death situations related to road safety.
To learn more about the White Paper on Transport, click here
To learn more about ERTICO, visit ertico.com
