Driving smart

Caroline Visser of the International Road Federation details the benefits intelligent transportation systems can bring, both for travellers and the environment.

“This is the core role of the IRF as a federation: to bring together stakeholders from all sides of the road development spectrum, from government ministries to transport agencies, from planning departments to environmental parties”
-Caroline Visser

While the mature economies in the developed world move towards creating integrated transport policies, emerging countries are searching for ways to strengthen their transport infrastructure through technology - and the Middle East is no different. Due to an increase in traffic congestion and growing road management costs, road building and development have now become critical needs in the region, forcing government ministries to find ways to look at alternative ways of maximising the road network. Intelligent transportation systems offer just such a solution.

"From a congestion and efficiency standpoint, I would say that managing a road network today without an ITS infrastructure is unimaginable," suggests Caroline Visser, Road Finance and ITS Programme Manager for the International Road Federation. "For road operators, it's a really vital tool and there are so many different ITS applications now - from monitoring and data collection solutions to see what's happening on the road, to options to guide traffic through dynamic signalling and travel information - that agencies can really tailor the solution to meet their specific needs. I would say that road operators today are very much dependent on ITS for not only congestion management and demand management, but also road safety."

While ITS is still largely a thing of the developed world, Visser explains that many emerging countries are implementing some interesting schemes too, such as those in Latin America, for instance, or South Africa, where much investment has been directed to ITS applications in preparation for this year's FIFA World Cup. India is also now embarking on an electronic tolling initiative, while a number of countries in the Middle East are also exploring the possibilities afforded by ITS. "While the developed world is currently ahead, emerging countries are also developing ITS solutions more than in the past," she says. "There's no reason why the Middle East should be any different. There's definitely an opportunity there to make a greater leap in the technology being implemented because of all the experience already gained in the developed world, which could be used by the Arab region to introduce ITS at a more advanced level."

Indeed, for Visser, research into the technologies themselves is no longer the main problem. She believes ITS technology is now at the stage where it can get the required results - provided the systems are implemented correctly. "It's more about taking research results and making them deployable on a large scale," she explains. "Today we're at the stage that it's more the implementation side that seems to be hampered."

To address this concern, Visser's team has set up an IRF working group dedicated to transport policies and their relationship with ITS. "Our feeling was that the positive impacts of ITS are sometimes overlooked. ITS is somewhat lacking in visibility, and it's not usually a very sexy topic with politicians. So what we have tried to do with this working group is raise the profile of ITS with the high-level decision-makers - ministers, transport secretaries and their immediate advisors, the high-level civil servants responsible people for policy decisions - firstly to generate enough budget for ITS research, but also to explain the benefits of ITS. We want to demystify it. ITS has a technology label attached to it, which can frighten some people, but in actual fact it's a really wide-ranging concept. There are so many applications and technologies that are encompassed in that single acronym. The technology is there, and it's ever-evolving, so that shouldn't be our main worry - raising awareness is now the key."

And this is the core role of the IRF as a federation: to bring together stakeholders from all sides of the road development spectrum, from government ministries to transport agencies, from planning departments to environmental parties. Its work encompasses the financing of roads, network optimisation, environmental concerns and road safety - as well as ITS, of course. "Our mandate is to organise knowledge management activities and share best practice among our members," says Visser. "We work closely together with the network of national ITS associations and are also open to representatives from international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, who are now embarking on a number of ITS initiatives from standardisation perspective. We have close contact with the European Commission. So it is the IRF that brings together all these different stakeholders to exchange best practices and share their knowledge."

She believes there are currently a number of countries that particularly stand out in terms of their use of ITS. "Each country has its focus, so I wouldn't be able to give you a top three because it differs so much between countries and even regions. But the UK is doing some interesting things - I'm sure you're aware of the London congestion charging scheme, but there's also an active traffic management project near Birmingham where they are using the hard shoulder of the motorway during peak hours and implementing all kinds of ITS applications around it to help monitor usage to ensure it's being used safely, to inform travellers of what is coming up, to tell them what the speed limit is, and so on.

"Some emerging economies like South Africa, Brazil, Chile and India are also developing some interesting solutions. For South Africa there's sort of an artificial deadline for ITS implementation because of the World Cup. For example, it's now introducing electronic fee collections throughout the public transport modes, as well as a bus rapid transit system, which is quite challenging because there's a lot of opposition from the taxi industry. There are a lot of toll roads in Brazil and Chile, where they use electronic tolling on a large scale. The Netherlands is another good example - a small country, densely populated, that doesn't have room to expand the network any further. As a result, the Dutch government has been forced to look into efficiency gains on the existing road network already for some decades. They have invested a lot in incident management systems to clear the road quickly after incidents occur and to reduce congestion, and are also planning to introduce a national road-charging scheme, which adds another dimension to ITS. Heavy users will pay more and light users pay less, while different charges are levied between peak and off-peak hours. So there are many examples, but I think it's important to point out that every country and region has its own context in terms of policy, but also in terms of needs and priorities."

Alongside enabling more effective use of the road network itself, there is another area in which ITS can play a key role: that of promoting a green and more sustainable use of the road network. "Road transport doesn't have a very good image in this regard," acknowledges Visser. "It contributes to 74 percent of all transport CO2 emissions. Nonetheless, many of our members are embarking, on a voluntary basis, on initiatives to reduce their own carbon footprint and to come up with innovations to make road construction, maintenance and operation greener. We have several initiatives within the IRF itself. We're developing a greenhouse gas calculator, which is an instrument that monitors emissions during the lifecycle of a road, and it is a tool that will enable members to calculate their emissions. ITS is helping because we think that traffic management and congestion reduction - in which ITS plays a big role - is a very important way to make roads and road transport more efficient and sustainable. Traffic management systems combined with emissions monitoring have a high potential in contributing to this. Also, to a certain extent, road-user charging has a part to play as it rationalises the mobility demand. It will not be a miracle solution for addressing transport growth, for example, but it might do something. For instance, it's been proven in Stockholm, where they introduced user charging in the city a few years ago, that there have been substantial gains in reducing emissions."

Encouraging a more sustainable approach to transportation is a key part of the IRF's philosophy, particularly given rising traffic volumes, but despite the huge strides taken in recent years it remains a significant challenge. "We have not succeeded in decoupling economic growth from growth in transport demand, and we have to look at realistic options to handle this growth in transport demand," concludes Visser. "Rather than just extending roads to accommodate this growth, we need to look more to software and mobility management in order to get the required efficiency gains. From our point of view, this will have a great impact on policy decisions because it will be all about the efficiency of the transport networks in place. ITS and traffic management can contribute to that, but maybe it is only part of the solution."

ITS: a regional perspective
By Mohammed Serroukh, Director of ITS Arab

Different countries are approaching the subject of intelligent transport systems in different ways, but they all recognise that ITS is important and needs to be dealt with properly.

For instance, Dubai has created a division within the RTA focused specifically on developing ITS solutions that has really advanced the understanding of how to build greater intelligence into transport systems within the emirate. Likewise in Bahrain there is a single agency charged with looking into potential ITS deployments. And then in Saudi, because it's a much larger country, they're actually linking together all the various ministries and government agencies involved in transport issues - the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Urban and Rural Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, traffic and environmental agencies, the border patrol - through a single coordinating committee. This committee is aimed at developing a common set of standards that each different constituency can use and that will contribute towards an interoperable ITS system from the initial deployment stage, in order to encourage interoperable ITS from day one.

So every country is dealing with it in its own way. But whatever the issues are, we need to tackle them in conjunction with the rest of the international community in order to try to find common solutions. And what we've been trying to do in our organisation - in cooperation with entities such as the International Roads Federation - is to try and develop what we are calling an 'ITS roadmap' to try to make it easier for people who are new to ITS to understand what ITS is and to better understand what type of solution is appropriate for which type of scenario. The whole idea of road and transport management needs to be considered in a much more holistic way so that the whole transportation network is developed with a greater focus on technology and operations.

So part of our work has been focused around looking at how a transportation network evolves, and while our work is still in progress we're already starting to form some ideas around that.  It starts with the development of the road infrastructure itself so that your network serves all the areas it needs to. Then you start to look at things like network optimisation, which is where junction redesign and overpasses, underpasses and bypasses all come into play to ensure you are getting the most out of that network. Once you've optimised your road infrastructure, the next step is to improve your public transport infrastructure. And then finally you get to look at areas like demand management. And of course, when you get to this stage, the information you've gathered starts to feed back - perhaps you'll find that you need to go back and do some more network optimisation or revisit your public transport schemes. It's not just a one-way stream.

And so we're starting to map where specific cities are in terms of this roadmap, and it's important to note that different parts of the region are at different stages of development. In Dubai, for instance, they are basically at the end of their network optimisation stage and are now entering the public transport build-up phase. Cairo is increasingly looking at demand management. And then in the majority of the cities in Saudi, they are still doing the network optimisation element and spending a large amount of money actually redesigning the road network.