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.
Monitoring Progress in Urban Road Safety
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
4 November 2020
- Set ambitious targets to reduce the number of casualties.
- Create joint mobility and safety observatories in cities.
- Put the focus on protecting vulnerable road users.
- Measure the safety of vulnerable road users in cities with appropriate indicators.
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.
Safe Micromobility
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
17 February 2020
- Allocate protected space for micromobility and keep pedestrians safe.
- To make micromobility safe, focus on motor vehicles.
- Regulate low-speed e-scooters and e-bikes as bicycles, higher-speed micro-vehicles as mopeds.
- Collect data on micro-vehicle trips and crashes.
- Proactively manage the safety performance of street networks.
- Include micromobility in training for road users.
- Tackle drunk driving and speeding across all vehicle types.
- Eliminate incentives for micromobility riders to speed.
- Improve micro-vehicle design.
- Reduce wider risks associated with shared micromobility operations.
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.
Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles?
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
22 May 2018
- Reinforce the Safe System approach to ensure automated vehicles are used safely.
- Apply Vision Zero thinking to automated driving.
- Avoid safety performance being used to market competing automated vehicles.
- Carefully assess the safety impacts of systems that share driving tasks between humans and machines.
- Require reporting of safety-relevant data from automated vehicles.
- Develop and use a staged testing regime for automated vehicles.
- Establish comprehensive cybersecurity principles for automated driving.
- Ensure the functional isolation of safety-critical systems and that connectivity does not compromise cybersecurity or safety.
- Provide clear and targeted messaging of vehicle capabilities.
British-Romanian researcher wins global award for analysis of drink-driving crashes
Media Release,
8 May 2018
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.
Speed and Crash Risk
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
28 March 2018
- Reduce the speed on roads as well as speed differences between vehicles.
- Set speed limits according to Safe System principles.
- Improve infrastructure and enforcement if speed limits are to be increased.
- Use automatic speed control to reduce speed effectively.
Alcohol-Related Road Casualties in Official Crash Statistics
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 February 2018
- Review how data on alcohol-related road crashes is collected.
- Aim for a systematic alcohol testing of every road user actively involved in a serious crash.
- Use statistical analysis methods to better estimate the number of alcohol-related road fatalities.
- Harmonise definitions of alcohol-related road casualties.
- Conduct future research on how to measure alcohol-related road crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Reporting on Serious Road Traffic Casualties
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
1 December 2011
- A complete picture of casualty totals from road crashes is needed to fully assess the consequences of road crashes and monitor progress.
- Injury information should complement information on fatal crashes to give a fuller picture of road crashes. Information on injuries should become more important for international comparisons.
- Police data should remain the main source for road crash statistics. However, because of underreporting problems and possible bias (for example with differing rates of reporting by vehicle type), police data should be complemented by hospital data, which are the next most useful source.
- The data from hospital emergency departments, available in some countries, should be monitored regularly and researched to determine if they might shed more light on road casualties.
- The assessment of the severity of injuries should preferably be done by medical professionals, and not by the police officer at the scene of the crash.
- Medical staff should be trained in order to systematically classify (road traffic) injuries using ICD International Classification of Diseases and to assess severities with indices such as the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) or the Maximum Abbreviated Injury (MAIS). This information -- without personal information -- should be made easily available for statistical purposes, policymaking and research.
- Besides police data and hospital data, other data sources are available. These have a limited value on their own, and cannot replace police or hospital data, but can be used to build a more balanced and comprehensive picture, to enrich the main data sources, and as a quality check.
- For linking data, the deterministic method is preferred if a unique personal identifier is available; otherwise the probabilistic method is a good alternative.
- The six assumptions needed to use the capture-recapture method must be considered carefully. Using this method combined with linking police and hospital data may be appropriate to give a fuller picture of road casualties.
- Having an internationally agreed definition of “serious” injuries will help the safety research community to better understand the consequences of road crashes and to monitor progress. Given the existing knowledge and practices, IRTAD proposes to define a ‘seriously injured road casualty’ as a person with injuries assessed at level 3 or more on the Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale i.e. "MAIS3+".
Accident Cost, Speed and Vehicle Mass Externalities, and Insurance
Discussion Paper,
21 September 2011
Road Safety - the Experience of the Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia
Discussion Paper,
31 August 2011