The pan-European project SOCRATES2.0 published its final digital magazine and public legacy. In the past five years, the SOCRATES2.0 project brought together road authorities, service providers and car manufacturers. Together they set new standards to share and integrate traffic information. It enabled effective traffic management and opened the door to innovative traffic information and navigation services.
The project’s main aim was to make traffic smoother, safer and more sustainable. Hence their slogan: fast, safe and green. SOCRATES2.0 also provided the essential building blocks to prepare Europe for the future of self-driving cars. The results of the SOCRATES2.0 are also of great value to the ERTICO coordinated TM2.0 Innovation platform.
In the SOCRATES2.0 project, the partners aimed to learn how to cooperate best, share relevant data, work towards standard interfaces and agree on principles and business models while taking each other’s interests into account and deploying interactive traffic management. Four city-regions welcomed the team and enabled real-life testing of the cooperation by deploying newly developed SOCRATES2.0 end-user services. Over 20,000 road users participated in the pilots by using and evaluating the services to determine what works and what doesn’t.
Most of the SOCRATES CEF-funded project partners are also active in ERTICO’s Innovation Platform TM2.0 since its early days in 2014. The TM2.0 Platform aims to facilitate the evolution of traffic management towards an interactive process that involves the traffic management authorities, the service providers, the infrastructure and the vehicle itself.
Dr Johanna Tzanidaki, Director of Innovation and Deployment at ERTICO and co-Chair of the TM 2.0 ERTICO Innovation Platform, commented, “Having acknowledged that what hampered the consistency of traffic information on the road network was the inability of traffic stakeholders to work with each other on an equal footing in exchanging traffic information, the TM2.0 concept aimed from the start at ensuring that all stakeholders involved in traffic could see them win(public sector)-win(private sector)-win(driver) in such a cooperation”.
SOCRATES 2.0 is deemed by the TM2.0 ERTICO Innovation Platform to be its proof of concept. However, the project has also expanded and further developed the TM 2.0 concept of co-option and trust as the principles dictating the conduct of stakeholders involved by adding a role for an intermediary. This entity facilitates the exchange and availability of data, as well as trust among the stakeholders. The project has proven the viability of interactive traffic management and shown that public authorities can orchestrate the direction of traffic by planning and justifying their decision-making within a continuous dialogue and exchange of information on set priorities with the private and public stakeholders in traffic.
The SOCRATES2.0 final digital magazine and public legacy can be found here.
Further information on SOCRATES2.0 can also be found on the project’s YouTube channel.
