The International Transport Forum has issued a call for entries for its 2015 ITF Transport Awards, with a deadline for entries of Friday, 30 January 2015 – to be presented in three categories at the International Transport Forum’s 2015 Summit on Transport, Trade and Tourism (27-29 May 2015 in Leipzig, Germany).
Award winners will be invited to showcase their project at the Summit to participants and international media.
The International Transport Forum at the OECD is an intergovernmental organisation with 54 member countries. It acts as a strategic think tank for transport policy and organises an Annual Summit of ministers.
The awards recognise leading examples of achievement, innovation and research that have “positively and significantly changed the transport industry, or have the potential to do so”.
The 2015 ITF Transport Awards are awarded in three categories:
The Transport Achievement Award recognises a demonstrated achievement of excellence in transport provision that has improved, enabled or facilitated tourism activity, and has been operational in the market for at least two years, but no more than five years. The Transport Achievement Award is open to any organisation (governmental and non-governmental), business or individual from ITF member and observer countries.The Promising Transport Innovation Award recognises an innovation that has the potential to significantly improve the transport offer for the movement of people and/or goods across one or more of the transport modes (motorised and non-motorised) or through the reduction or elimination of travel.
The Promising Transport Innovation Award is open to any organisation (governmental and non-governmental), business or individual from ITF member or observer countries. The award is supported by SMART (Sustainable Mobility and Accessibility Research and Transformation).
The Young Researcher of the Year Award rewards creative reflection and analysis on the part of young researchers investigating the contribution of transport to the well-being of our societies. It aims to highlight the importance of transport research for sound transport policy formulation and implementation. Thew award is open to researchers under 35 years of age who have undertaken their research in an institution, university or consultancy firm within ITF member or observer countries. The Young Researcher Award carries a prize of 5000 euros.
The closing date for applications for all three awards is Friday, 30 January 2015. The Awards will be presented to the winners in a ceremony during the International Transport Forum’s Annual Summit in Leipzig, Germany, in the presence of transport ministers from around the world.
Last year’s winners
The Winner of the 2014 Transport Achievement Award was the city of Milan, one of the most car-dependent in Europe, and also among the few to have introduced a road pricing measure.
Unlike the well-known cases of London and Stockholm, it was concern for the levels of pollution (rather than congestion) that initially led to the introduction of the ‘Ecopass’ scheme in 2008. In the following years, public debate focused on the effectiveness of this pollution charge in reducing PM10, a pollutant with adverse health impacts.
The scheme was upgraded to a congestion charge in 2012, following the results of a city-wide referendum in which 79.1% of voters demanded both an upgrade and an extension of theEcopass area. This was in stark contrast with the experience of other cities, where voters have rejected charging schemes, for instance in Edinburgh or Manchester in the UK. Even in Stockholm, another reference for the introduction of road charging, the voters approved the local congestion charge with a mere 51%.
A new city administration has recently implemented a monitoring system for Black Carbon, a new PM metric that is more suitable to prove the effectiveness of traffic restrictions.
Milan therefore is the only city which can boast two types of road pricing measures, pollution charge and congestion charge.
According to a recent statement of the president of AICAI (Courier Aircraft Association), the scheme has resulted in an increase in productivity of 10% on freight deliveries in the city.
A detailed analysis has shown decreasing traffic congestion (-28%) and reduced travelling time of private transport and improved public transport networks
Xerox Merge Smart Parking was a Joint Winner of the 2014 Promising Innovation in Transport Award, a city-wide sensor based, smart parking solution. Merge was deployed in downtown Los Angeles as part of the LA Express Park project in June 2012. It uses the data from smart meters, off-street parking lots and over 6 000 on-street parking sensors to get a complete view of parking demand and behaviour in a 6 square mile area. The system feeds this data in real-time to smart phone applications and a vehicle’s navigation system to provide guided parking, i.e. to provide motorists with actual parking rates and guidance to available spaces.
A pay-by-cell system allows drivers to pay for, and top up their parking meters using a cell phone or smart phone.
The other joint winner was Holland Container Innovation’s 4FOLD Foldable Container. 4FOLD is a 40ft High-Cube foldable, collapsible, container that can be folded to a quarter of the height. The 4FOLD container is currently in use around the world by three major shipping lines and one leasing company. A pilot project is running between the Netherlands and Spain to assess the performance of 4FOLD containers in economic, environmental and technical terms.
