Current status and future prospects of Intelligent Transport Systems deployment in South East Europe

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is a powerful vehicle, not only for gaining traffic and transport benefits, as for example less congestion and shorter travel times, but also for economic growth. The European Union (EU) has already published a Directive (2010/40/EU) in order to regulate the coordinated and coherent deployment of ITS in all member states. However the deployment in different EU member states has yet to be integrated. According to the European Commission, South East Europe (SEE) is an area, where ITS deployment is very “fragmented and uncoordinated and cannot provide geographical continuity of ITS services throughout the region”. This paper provides information on the current status of ITS deployment and implementation in SEE Area through the status of nine SEE countries. The results demonstrate the assets and drawbacks for further deployment in these countries and the level of harmonization of their national laws to the European Directive, a prerequisite that could alleviate the fragmentation of the ITS provisioning along different regions within the nations but also at cross-border areas. Afterwards, the methodology for creating national roadmaps on ITS deployment is presented as well as the final roadmaps for each of the nine countries. The findings of these roadmaps are crucial for future ITS deployment in SEE considering that the level of maturity of ITS deployment in each country has been taken into account.