VISION: Road Transport in Europe 2025 - FEHRL

user to make informed decisions or at least understand the cause of any delays.
It will be feasible for drivers and freight operators to book journey 'slots' as part of a multi-modally coordinated
total journey. This might include walking, car, bus, train.
Data
Taken as a whole, the data capture capability of the systems providing road-vehicle-driver linkages will be
extensive. This will range from data on the physical state of the roads themselves, through to the movements
of individual drivers, their trajectories, and their environment. Such data, taken together, will provide an
enormous step forward in our capability of managing traffic movement and the externalities that it generates.
Data on traffic flows will enable journey times to be predicted with much greater accuracy. The availability of
such data will enable operators to manage traffic flows and users to be advised of the optimum route to their
destination. There should be improved sharing of information between modes allowing better planning of
intermodal travel and making modal shift from the road more attractive. The ability to plan journeys in
advance and to obtain through-ticketing between different modes will be particularly beneficial to the
increasing number of elderly travellers.
Controls and Restraints
Most of the foregoing is about enablement: enabling free movement by providing road capacity or enhancing
existing capacity, managing it better, and providing better information and options for users. But the new
systems will also allow more sophisticated restraint of individual actions contrary to the common good.These
fall into three broad categories: demand restraint, risk restraint, and environmental restraint.
The first, demand restraint, sets out to limit the number of low value trips so as to reduce demand to match
available capacity. This is most commonly conceived in financial terms - as road pricing or congestion pricing
or via deliberate capacity limitations, e.g. parking restrictions. The new IT and communication systems linked
to the roads infrastructure will in principle provide all the apparatus for charging users for their use of the road,
if necessary as a function of the operating conditions at the time (for example if the road is heavily loaded or
not) and a number of other factors. There are already a number of charging systems world-wide, although they
are at present still very uncommon. Governments generally believe that if traffic growth continues as
expected some form of restraint by charging is highly likely to be needed. By 2025 we expect charging within
cities to be well established in Western Europe and probably more widely across Europe as a whole. The
possible conditions and rules applied to such charging could vary widely. Inter-urban charging may also be
in place, and this would help to balance transport costs between modes in the Government-Led scenario or to
set the conditions of operation in the Market-Led scenario. Charges could be supplementary to existing fuel
tax and vehicle charges through general taxation, or they could in some circumstances replace them. By 2025
we expect vehicle recognition systems and financial collection systems to be well established. How the
revenues are used is considered later.
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