VISION: Road Transport in Europe 2025 - FEHRL

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T he
6GETTING THERE: WHATDOWENEED
TO KNOW?
Vision for 2025 developed in Chapter 5 is not a recipe. It does not set out machinery which if operated
would cause a particular future to come about. Neither is it a political manifesto of things we want to
happen and are laying out in order to persuade constituencies to adopt and own them. Neither is it solely a
matter of prediction, although it does have a strong element of prediction in it.
Rather, it is a statement of what we believe is broadly likely to happen, given what we know of advancing
trends, requirements and opportunities. Its main function is to point out these opportunities and where they
could lead. In most cases it is clear that to realise them we need to know things that we do not currently know.
The key to moving forward strongly is first to gain the necessary knowledge.
Therefore we feel the most pressing need is to identify the areas of enquiry that are crucial to achieving the
Vision. The following sections do that. In drawing them up, we have adopted a simple classification
deliberately aligned with those that FEHRL developed in parallel with its partners for the ERTRAC VISION and
consisting of four themes: Design and Production Systems; Environment, Energy and Resources; Safety and
Security and Mobility, Transport and Infrastructure. This enables cross reference.
Here, we are concerned with road transport, and in particular with the implications of the 2025 Vision for the
roads infrastructure. A major theme for the future is asset management - how to assess needs and benefits and
how to ensure proper, sustainable management of the infrastructure. This theme runs through many of the
subject areas which follow. As we have argued, in 2025 we believe the roads infrastructure will go much wider
than the physical roads themselves and will include the road-vehicle ether infrastructure and financial
infrastructure as well. Therefore in the following we have set out all of these parts. But to help relate the areas
of enquiry to the present (2004) conception of the roads infrastructure we have identified three themes with
specific relevance to FEHRL's activities and interests. From this, we have:
- those that have direct relevance to road infrastructure (for example, understanding the physical
processes that cause road deterioration);
- those that have indirect relevance to road infrastructure (for example, development of data
management systems for road condition monitoring); and
- hybrid themes that for implementation require complementary development in road and in other
transport fields (for example, cooperative vehicle-highway systems).
Directly relevant themes are indicated with ■, indirect themes with , and hybrid themes with ●. Other themes
are complementary - they set the context for road transport - these are highlighted with ◆.