VISION: Road Transport in Europe 2025 - FEHRL

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charges, road tolls, congestion charging). Other policies aimed at reducing demand include encouraging the
introduction of flexible time working and, at a grander level, integrating transport-land use policies.
The recent technological advances allowing tele-activities (teleworking, teleshopping and so on) also seem,
prima facie, to offer to substitute for some physical trips and so reduce demand for travel. However, experience
so far indicates that this tends to be complementary rather than wholly substitutional, and that tele-activities in
general mostly tend to add a further level of activity. Teleworking may however induce temporal shifts in travel.
Multimodal Trips
At present there is little co-ordination between different transport modes for users making multimodal
journeys - bus, train, tram, car etc. Advances in Information Control and Technology (ICT) will provide the
means to make this possible. The effective up-take of such technologies will depend very much on
organisational issues and any financial incentives to operators.
Vehicle Engineering
Although the vision we are seeking is about roads in 2025, vehicles and vehicle technology bear strongly on
it. This will become clear in Section 6 below. Here we briefly summarise vehicle technology development.
Considerable progress is being made in vehicle engineering to address safety, pollution and energy saving,
and to provide the driver with more information.
Safety
In recent years, the design and marketing of motor vehicles have been strongly influenced by the European New
Car Assessment Programme (EURO NCAP). This is leading to improvements in the quality of information provided
to consumers and to better protection of the occupants of vehicles.The trend over the next few years is likely to be
towards better protection of vulnerable road users.
Many active safety devices now available on the market improve vehicle stability in braking/traction and help
drivers to keep safe distances among moving and fixed obstacles.Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS) are now installed
on most cars on the EU market, while newer electronic devices such as Electronic Stability Programmes (ESP),
Electronic Brake-force Distributors (EBD), and Traction Control (TC) are now available on many cars and trucks. ESP
uses sensors to determine the steered path and help the driver keep it under control by applying appropriate brake
pressure to individual wheels or reducing engine output to correct understeering or oversteering. Programmes to
develop independent tests of the claims made for each system are currently in progress.
Side obstacle detection and lane-departure warnings are available on a few luxury cars and some lorries.They
use radar or video sensors to detect frontal and side obstacles respectively, or to avoid involuntary over-running of
the lane border. Tyre pressure monitors use piezoelectric sensors to obtain real-time measurements of tyre