FEHRL Vision 2025 for Road Transport In Europe

The Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL) was formed in 1989 by the National Highway Research Laboratories in EU and EFTA countries. The mission of FEHRL is to promote and facilitate collaboration between its institutes and provide high quality information and advice to governments, the European Commission, the road industry and road users on technologies and policies related to roads. To promote common research activities a five-year Strategic European Road Research Programme (SERRP) is usually defined through detailed implementation plans. In implementing its fourth version of SERRP, FEHRL has taken a long-term “ Vision” of the future of roads and of the research needed to support their development and operation. The aim of the Vision 2025 is to illustrate the current position and key trends of road transport, propose a range of possibilities for the future, draw out differences, identify decision areas and ultimately consider consequences for 2025. The “Vision 2025” begins with a brief overview of the current position of road transport across Europe and of the known time trends at present. Based on that knowledge, likely future changes were drown out and a number of possible scenarios constructed, starting from two extremes: an ideal future supply-side and a do-nothing or do-minimum supply side. Three other scenarios between these extremes were examined: a government-driven scenario, a market driven scenario and a sustainability scenario. From them a single future based on the likely technological, societal and policy options was drawn up. Future technological and financial possibilities were considered with respect to seven primary “desirables”: that travel should be smart, safe, clean, comfortable and reliable; that access to business and leisure activities should be available in proportion to value and need, and that each part of the network should be suitable for its function. Accordingly to the previously mentioned analysis, four categories of enquiry and development were identified to fulfil future needs: design and production systems; environment, energy and resources; safety and security; mobility, transport and infrastructure. For each category a series of desirable research matters were suggested. The results arisen from this “Vision” were carried out capturing those elements of the projection with a reasonable level of probability, leading to conclusions that are common to a range of scenarios. How these scenarios will develop and which of the issues emerged in this study will prevail depends on the policies that are pursued in the coming years. One of the most relevant issues of the Vision is the linkage between road, vehicle and driver, enabled by the continuous progress in communications and IT systems, which constitutes the core of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Initiatives in ITS field begun in the 1960s led to many implementations that introduced automation and real time information in the traffic management and culminated in the automated highways initiative, which represents the most fascinating and debated vision of future road transport. Several field experiments demonstrated automated highways are technically feasible. However, there are many barriers to their actual development that include costs, liability, psychological and institutional issues. A more practicable alternative, which many studies predict being largely implemented by 2025, is a partial application of automation that leaves the driving task to the driver and assists him or her by continuously verifying safety conditions. In the paper a survey of experiments carried out in USA, Europe and Japan will be presented and the main technical issues to integrate road condition detection sensors, traffic monitoring devices and vehicle control sensors will be discussed.