Brussels, 03/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - From now until the end of his term of office, European Commissioner for Transport Siim Kallas will not be taking his eyes off the intelligent transport systems (ITS). The commissioner announced that in this area he would be prioritising European multimodal journey planners and cooperative systems for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.
In his opening speech at the 2013 ITS conference, he announced new initiatives in this field for next year. These would include a roadmap on delivering multimodal travel information, planning and ticketing services over the next few months. He asserted that he would be working with his services on “how to achieve this aim” by way of the least intrusive policies possible and leaving the field free for industry to produce new and innovative solutions. According to studies and public consultations carried out by the Commission, European action is needed with regard to multimodal data (with the necessary guarantees on information sources) to facilitate exchange of the information (with interoperable formats, for example) and clarify liability in multimodal journeys.
He is also counting on “boosting” deployment of the cooperative systems at a time when vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication at a technical level is now a real possibility. He promised that by the end of his mandate he would be able to propose a definite policy framework on this subject. (MD/transl.fl)