The European Commission (EC) has announced that the Commissioner for Transport, Violeta Bulc (below), will open the EC’s 5th Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), which will be held on April 24 in in Brussels, Belgium. Representatives of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU and the European Parliament will also be present at the conference, which is expected to bring together high-level representatives from various European institutions, and representatives of public and private stakeholders from the ITS community. Participation, which is free of charge, is open to all members of the ITS community interested in exchanging views on various actions and initiatives. The organizers have stated that the conference venue has a limited capacity, so it may be necessary to restrict the number of delegates per organization. However, the conference will be streamed online, with interpretation available in English, French, Latvian and German.
The conference, which is titled ‘A Digital Strategy for Mobility: from capacity to connectivity’, will address: the use of data for digitizing transport; mobility as a service; and connectivity and automation. The EC will host the event, with the objective to provide an overview of the state-of-play with regard to a number of key actions and major initiatives in the context of the EC’s ITS Action Plan and the ITS Directive 2010/40/EU, which was adopted in July 2010 to accelerate the deployment of innovative transport technologies across Europe. The Directive is seen as an important instrument for the coordinated implementation of ITS in Europe, and aims to establish interoperable and seamless ITS services, while leaving Member States free to decide which systems to invest in. The Directive’s first priorities will be traffic and travel information, the eCall emergency system, and intelligent truck parking.
