Council and Parliament strike a deal on the roll-out of intelligent transport systems

With a view to accelerating digital transition and smarter mobility in the EU, the Council presidency and European Parliament representatives reached a provisional agreement on the revision of the 2010 directive on the deployment of intelligent transport systems (ITS).

Intelligent transport systems are vital to increase road safety and tackle Europe's growing emission and congestion problems. Today’s deal will boost our Union’s evolution towards a smarter, safer, more efficient, and more sustainable mobility.

Andreas Carlson, Swedish minister for infrastructure and housing

The revised directive aims to take account of technological developments, such as connected and automated mobility, on-demand mobility applications, and multimodal transport. It also aims to accelerate the availability and enhance the interoperability of digital data that feed these services. The proposal therefore represents an important step towards creating the common European mobility data space.

Today’s provisional agreement preserves the ambition to move forward in the systematic and harmonised deployment of intelligent transport systems but in a gradual manner to take full account of the cost-benefit relation and of administrative capacity.

The agreement retains the structure of the Commission’s proposal, which builds on the framework character of the ITS directive and the various technical interventions by way of implementing and delegated acts.

The necessary types of data, including access conditions for tunnels and bridges, speed limits, traffic circulation plans, permanent access restrictions, road closures, roadworks, temporary traffic management measures, as well as the critical services, such as road safety-related traffic information services, to be made available across the Union, are set out in the annexes to the directive.

The new directive therefore contains an implementation programme covering at least the next 5 years and a precise geographical scope of road network. By way of delegated acts, the Commission may further complement certain aspects of this implementation programme.

Finally, the text of the political agreement clarifies and specifies several provisions of the proposal, in particular the provisional treatment of emergency situations, the protection of personal data, the priority areas for the deployment and use of specifications and standards and the principles applying to the development of EU-level technical specifications.

Next steps

The provisional agreement must now be endorsed by the Council and the Parliament. It will then be formally adopted by both institutions following legal-linguistic revision. From the Council’s side, the Swedish presidency intends to submit the text to member states’ representatives (Coreper) for endorsement as soon as possible.

Background

The Commission adopted in December 2020 the communication on a sustainable and smart mobility strategy that proposes a fundamental transformation of the European transport system to achieve the objective of sustainable, smart, and resilient mobility. Digitalisation is an indispensable driver of this transformation and will make the entire transport system seamless and more efficient. It will also further increase levels of safety, security, reliability, and comfort. The strategy identifies the deployment of intelligent transport systems (ITS) as a key action in building a connected and automated multimodal mobility system. ITS integrate telecommunications and information technologies with transport engineering in order to plan, design, operate, maintain and manage transport systems.

Directive 2010/40/EU (the ITS directive) was designed to be the framework for accelerating and coordinating the deployment and use of ITS applied to road transport and its interfaces with other transport modes. Due to key technological developments since then, a radical reform of the legislative framework is now necessary. To this end, on 15 December 2021, the Commission submitted a proposal for the revision of the directive. The proposal is part of a package of legislative initiatives aimed at contributing to the goals of decarbonisation, digitalisation and greater resilience in transport infrastructure.