Overview
The Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway together with Schleswig- Holstein, Niedersachsen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hamburg and Bremen of Germany, initiated in 1995 a joint action, the VIKING project, aiming to achieve development and co-ordination of national and cross-border ITS.
In 2001 VIKING was established as part of the TEMPO programme which ran until 2006 during which the European dimension grew steadily in importance. Hence the partners from VIKING decided to participate in EasyWay from 2007 as one of eight regional projects. At the same moment Lithuania also decided to join EasyWay and EasyWay VIKING.
The VIKING area covers a considerable part of northern Europe, and offers extremely varying conditions for road transport. On some links on the Trans-European Road Network (TERN) the annual average daily flow of vehicles may be less than 1000 in the northern part of the area, while there are also links with well above 100 000 vehicles daily. This means that the aspect of traffic management will cover a wide range of different systems and activities over the area. The road and traffic situation in Northern Europe has certain characteristics that give Road and Traffic Management another signification than when applied to the road network and traffic situation in the denser part of Central and Western Europe:
- The traffic load is fairly low on the interregional network (except for certain German links)
- There are few or no alternative routes in case of disturbances
- Capacity problems are local
- Road Weather conditions can be extremely hart
- Ferry links forms an important part of the road transport network
- Road User Charging is emerging
The goal of the co-operation in VIKING was to ensure homogeneity and continuity of services for road users, and to enable interoperability for mobile equipment including equipment for automatic road user fee collection.
VIKING was also an important tool to spread knowledge about these systems and services between the countries and to speed up the implementation process for the Trans-European Network for Transport (TEN-T).
To better manage the impact of weather on traffic, and to take advantage of new technologies to ease other traffic-related problems, the VIKING project co-ordinated national and bi-lateral traffic management schemes, and implementation of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway) and five regions in northern Germany.
Funding
Results
- Monitoring guidelines – A first step towards common European services
- Salt Spreader Control – Efficiency and healthier environment from innovative ITS
- Hard shoulder driving – ITS for extra capacity on transport corridors during peak hour
- TTIS – A comprehensive co-modal traveller information service on internet
- EasyGo – Interoperable EFC in three countries, a milestone in the European development
- TransportXXL – a cross-border internet service for HGV, a first step towards interoperability
Policy implications
The approach needs to be shifted towards deployment of services rather than systems. Also, the traveller and hauler shall stand in focus, rather than the road user in general. This means that co-modality shall be a core issue as well as freight and logistics. Interfaces between transport modes and urban traveller needs shall be addressed.