Road
How Urban Delivery Vehicles can Boost Electric Mobility
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
9 December 2020
- Prioritise electrification of vehicles with high mileage and regular daily activity, including LCVs in last-mile delivery.
- Promote electric light commercial vehicles in cities and tightly regulate combustion-engine vehicles.
- Strengthen fuel economy standards, zero-emission mandates and economic incentives for light commercial vehicles.
- Define regulatory requirements and clarify costs for upgrades to the electricity grid needed for electric vehicles.
- Use vehicle design and components of electric passenger cars to unlock price reductions of electric light commercial vehicles.
- Strengthen co-operation among stakeholders to reduce investments risks for the manufacturing of electric light commercial vehicles.
Regulations and Standards for Clean Trucks and Buses
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
14 September 2020
- Ensure that vehicle safety regulations and standards for electric and hydrogen cover all classes of road vehicles and better differentiate between light and heavy vehicles.
- Leverage the experience of international regulatory fora to extend the coverage of safety-related requirements to heavy electric vehicles.
- Ensure that the scope of regulations on the safety of hydrogen-powered heavy vehicles addresses aspects that are currently not adequately considered.
- Involve diverse transport and energy stakeholders in the development of charging standards for electric heavy vehicles.
- Address missing elements in regulations and standards related to electric road systems.
- Develop hydrogen refuelling protocols for heavy vehicles using gaseous storage at 70 MPa, new nozzles and instruments guaranteeing compliance with stringent fuel quality requirements.
- Increase the focus of pre-normative research on the safe use of low- and zero emission vehicles with existing vehicle infrastructure, especially for hydrogen-powered options.
- Harmonise regulations on tailpipe GHG emissions and energy consumption of heavy vehicles, also integrating instruments evaluating energy use for low- and zero-emission vehicles.
- Fully integrate electricity and hydrogen into regulatory policies on low-carbon fuels.
- Address non-regulated pollutants and integrate hydrogen-powered vehicles using internal combustion engines in regulations on tailpipe pollutant emissions.
- Address the environmental performance of vehicle batteries with regulatory innovation targeting their durability, carbon footprint and the sustainability of associated supply chains.
- Develop an internationally harmonised regulatory framework for the application of differentiated road charges and access restrictions based on environmental performances of vehicles.
ITF launches web overview of Covid-19-related measures for passenger and road transport in Europe
Media Release,
26 March 2020
Reforming Public Transport Planning and Delivery
Research Report, Policy Insights,
24 February 2020
- Let government plan transport services, but at a decentralised level.
- Consider corporatising publicly operated transport services.
- Pay close attention to system design where competition in public transport provision is introduced.
- Pay attention to service quality as well as costs to achieve a sustainable public transport system.
- Take the broader urban context into account in designing and adopting public transport reforms.
Policies to Extend the Life of Road Assets
Research Report, Policy Insights,
20 December 2018
- Introduce a proactive approach for the maintenance of road assets.
- Build a proactive, data-driven approach to the maintenance of road assets.
- Strive for continuous professionalisation in road asset management.
- Move from managing the assets to cross-asset management.
- Adopt regulatory frameworks that treat the use of road assets as an economic input.
- Implement infrastructure pricing for trucks to improve cost recovery.
- Better understand the reasons for non-compliance with truck weight limits.
- Focus on positive incentives for efficiency in regulatory and compliance frameworks.
- Develop use cases and business models for the digital infrastructure of truck traffic management.
- Create incentives for the logistics sector to implement truck traffic management.
- Improve awareness of the mutual impact that policies have on the environmental performance of road freight transport and extending the lifespan of road assets.
- Focus on creating a comprehensive regulatory environment rather than on individual measures.
Assessing the Net Overall Distributive Effect of a Congestion Charge
Discussion Paper,
11 October 2018
The Social Impacts of Road Pricing
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
10 October 2018
- Make demand management and congestion reduction the primary objective of road pricing.
- Differentiate road pricing by location and time.
- Combine road pricing and public transport planning to improve efficiency.
- Examine the combined effects of scheme design and mitigation to understand distributional impacts.
- Consider the use of discounts and exemptions carefully.
- Develop road pricing as part of an intervention package to achieve better utilisation of urban space.
- Reconcile economic, practical and political aspects in the design of road pricing schemes.
- Differentiate charges and consider adopting a rules-based pricing approach.
Private Investment in Transport Infrastructure: Dealing with Uncertainty in Contracts
Research Report, Policy Insights,
21 June 2018
- Pursue private investment in infrastructure on the merits of improved efficiency.
- Invest more into upfront preparation of projects to reduce inefficient risk pricing by suppliers.
- Undertake a comprehensive analysis of how to assist suppliers.
- The pursuit of certainty in delivery should be balanced against cost.
- Stimulate innovation through early contractor involvement or alliancing, not public-private partnerships.
- Avoid transferring demand risk to public-private partnerships if service levels do not strongly impact demand.
- Bundle and cross-fund public-private partnerships to reduce demand risk.
- Adopt the regulatory asset base model where competition is absent or demand not strongly endogenous.
- Introduce a transparent public accounting standard to maximise the value for money of private investment.
- Foster competitive markets to achieve cost-effective infrastructure.
- Pursue data collection on how contract design affects project outcomes.
- Support the development of an evidence-supported procurement tool.
Cooperative Mobility Systems and Automated Driving
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
2 May 2018
- Shared mobility is still a relatively new field but is progressing rapidly. With business models and preferred technologies still in flux, policy makers need to prepare considered responses to these developments without delay.
- Service concepts and technology currently and on the brink of being explored need to consider a range of design domain restrictions, dependencies on infrastructure, operating principles and user interfaces.
- Specific service concepts should be matched to specific operational environments, on a detailed local level as well as across continents and cultures.
- Government action will affect how automated vehicles will impact society. Existing approaches will not be appropriate for long. Their understanding and input will help to balance the debate on whether AVs can indeed alleviate a series of stubborn problems.
Moving Freight with Better Trucks
Research Report, Policy Insights,
18 April 2011
- The freight transport task is growing rapidly in most regions and requires effective utilisation of all modes of transport.
- The safety and environmental impacts of road haulage require regulatory intervention for optimal outcomes.
- Compliance can be improved greatly through legislation that assigns responsibility.
- Compliance regimes can be enhanced by exploiting technological innovations.
- A performance based approach to regulation offers the potential to meet community objectives for road freight transport more fully.
- Many higher capacity vehicles have equivalent or even better intrinsic safety characteristics in some respects than most common workhorse trucks.
- Truck crash energies mean safety regulation must pay particular attention to managing truck speeds and driver alertness and impairment.
- Higher capacity vehicles have potential to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.
- Higher capacity vehicles can result in fewer vehicle-kilometres travelled.
- The lower unit costs offered by higher productivity trucks could result in increased overall demand for road freight transport and a transfer of freight from other modes.
- Road pricing systems can be developed to manage use of the transport network more efficiently.
- Road infrastructure and trucks need to be developed in concert.
- Significant opportunities for improvement of the regulation of heavy trucks have been identified.