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CIMEC project  funded from EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme deals with Cooperative ITS for Mobility in European cities. Its primary aims are to understand potential benefits and impacts of cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) on urban environments, since most of the work to date has been focused heavily on the highways context.

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CIMEC partnership has just delivered a Roadmap addressing Cooperative ITS for medium-sized European cities which may become a valuable toolbox for all cities. The Roadmap describes the context of how cities currently work and how C-ITS could fit in this context. Specific use cases are analysed in order to assist cities evaluate sections of their strategies and ways of formulating a coherent strategy. The last section of the Roadmap explores how C-ITS deployment in cities may be affected by developments beyond the control of the cities and their supply chains.

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The general aim of C-ITS – cooperative ITS – is that, by having access to data from others, each stakeholder in the activity of transport will be able to make better decisions that they could if they just relied on their own data. Actually a range of fields can benefit from C-ITS: multimodal traffic & transport management, information exchange, management of urban fright/electric vehicles/ traffic lights/parking / incidents, monitoring of air pollution, car sharing, signaling, etc.

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The survey conducted in view of this Roadmap concludes that mature and effective ITS solutions most probably need more time to emerge. Currently the lack of standards seems to be an important technical barrier.

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It turns out that the almost-universal policy goals for all cities are:

• To reduce congestion

• To improve the environment, esp. air pollution

• To maintain safety on the network

• To promote excellent public transport

CIMEC Roadmap identified and analysed 18 case studies relevant to those goals. To achieve these goals, a city will need to ensure it spends its limited budget most effectively and efficiently when it comes to technology. Roadmap can guide cities in their planning for C-ITS taking into account a variety of parameters, such as quality of the evidence of benefit, technical and commercial feasibility, utility to road users and city managers along with social issues and privacy. A major first step for all cities is to create an evidence baseline in order to demonstrate that the planned investment is sustainable and cost-effective. The majority of cities seems to lack such evidence base system.  Funding, technical and implementation support is available to all cities through a range of national and European initiatives.

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Source: European Commission