eSafety European Observers meet in Lisbon for 2007 review

Creation date: 20 December 2007

15 Member States gather for annual meeting, 6-7 December 2007.

eSafety stakeholders representing national interests converged in Lisbon 6-7 December 2007 for their yearly European-wide Observers meeting. Involving over 15 Member States, the meeting focused on three central areas of eSafety activities: Real-time traffic and travel information (RTTI), deployment, and cooperative systems. 

The meeting was organised by the eSafety Support project with the support of Portuguese infrastructure operator BRISA. The fifth in an annual series of European-level meetings, it gave participants the opportunity to cooperate and share experiences on key issues relating to eSafety. It caps off a successful year of Regional Observers meetings held in Delft/Rotterdam, The Netherlands and Brno, Czech Republic which allowed participants to discuss and debate eSafety issues with the local and regional stakeholders.

The meeting was opened with high-level remarks by Paulo Marques Augusto, President of the Portuguese National Authority for Road Safety. Mr Augusto gave an update on road safety in Portugal, noting that Portugal has made a lot of progress over the last 10 years in reducing road fatalities. His organisation bases its work on infrastructure (extension of the motor way network and attention to road black spots), vehicles (new legal measures) and human behaviour.

Mr André Vits, Head of Unit European Commission DG INFSO was also on hand to brief the Observers about the latest eSafety developments, including the various reports from eSafety Forum Working Groups and the new proposals on cooperative systems.

Presentations and discussion time around the three main meeting topics – RTTI, deployment and cooperative systems – allowed participants to share insights and developments in these areas with their eSafety Observer peers.

The Observers concluded that in regards to RTTI, more common criteria are needed for the evaluation of its implementation, and a set of indicators on RTTI implementation should be elaborated. In terms of Intelligent Infrastructure, the Observers agreed that infrastructure improvements are needed in order to deploy eSafety Systems, and performance indicators should be identified in order to evaluate the service provided by the infrastructure. Finally, regarding deployment, the Observers noted that all stakeholders should provide more incentives for the use of eSafety Systems and current awareness campaigns such as ChooseESC! are valuable towards the increase of user awareness.

Looking forward to 2008, the Observers’ agenda includes several regional meetings, foreseen for Belgium/Luxembourg as well as the Baltic states.

For more information, please contact info@esafetysupport.org

Visit to the BRISA TMC