Intelligent transport systems - Risks and opportunities

The aim is to describe the integration of information and communication technologies in the transport sector. This is leading to changes in the organization and use of vehicles and infrastructure, and to new, "intelligent" modes of transport. In France, the transport sector employs over a million people, and accounts for 18% of GDP (€350 billion), around half of which is spent by households. Public authorities spend €30 billion a year on infrastructure maintenance and construction, and on operating the transport systems they manage .

In the absence of a precise study on the economics of intelligent transport, which has yet to be carried out, it is worth noting that the National Industry Conference, which brings together representatives of the major professional sectors, states in its report for 2011 that "digital technology accounts for more than a quarter of growth in France and 40% of productivity gains in the economy". Ensuring that the world of transport and the world of IT, automation and telecommunications are properly linked is therefore a very important and urgent issue. Indeed, the transport sector is finding it extremely difficult to meet mobility needs with acceptable levels of safety, punctuality and comfort, while keeping costs, energy consumption, pollution emissions and nuisances under control. We need to take advantage of the rapid evolution of digital technologies and the relative fall in their costs to make current modes of transport more efficient and to renew their uses (see box on self-service bicycles and car-sharing).

The first Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) were developed to facilitate infrastructure management (centralized management of traffic light junctions) and metro operations (automation). Public policies, notably for infrastructure financing and road safety, have already made extensive use of ITS. Today's innovations focus mainly on uses and comparisons between different ways of making journeys (multimodality), shifting them in time or even avoiding them (mobility management).

Two aspects of these systems are complementary and need to be dealt with in parallel: a technical aspect and an organizational aspect. As in the theater, the term "actor" is used to designate those who "play a role" in the world of transport. These roles are defined by national and international legal texts, which set out the responsibilities of each actor and enable them to insure themselves against...