After more than two years of cooperation among research institutions, public agencies and administration of six countries around the topic of  ITS, the POLITE Project Final Conference in Cosenza (ITA), on 9th October 2014 took place. The conference gave the opportunity to present and discuss the achieved results which were proposed to the wider community of technicians and decision makers.

You can DOWNLOAD the event Agenda.

The POLITE project is entering in its last year. It will be a very intense year as the partners are working on the elaboration of their implementation plans. These plans will showcase the lessons learnt and how they will be applied in each site’s home environment. In the 4^th newsletter, which has just been published, each of the implementation plans are presented in short, giving an idea of what good practice each site will adopt. The newsletter offers also other interesting articles to read, such as one on the topic “Will credit cards overshadow current smart cards in public transport ticketing?”

The POLITE project partners are meeting between 12-13 March for a Joint Policy Exercise meeting in Brno, Czech Republic. Partners will discuss their implementation plans and will have a site visit to the Brno traffic control centre (the second best in the country) and to the Brno public transport control centre.

All partners are organising local dissemination events in their countries throughout 2014 and the POLITE final conference will take place at the end of October, beginning of November. For more information, check regularly the POLITE website: http://www.polite-project.eu/

In Calabria region (Italy), lessons learnt from the project are being integrated in its new Regional Transport Plan, currently under preparation. The Regional Transport Plan will tackle 4 areas: mobility of persons; mobility of goods; ITS & security; and special areas (e.g. intermodal hub of Gioia Tauro’s port). POLITE will provide direct input to the elaboration of the ITS guidelines for the Plan. To this aim, Calabria will make use primarily of two of the identified good practices within the project: the Mi Muovo good practice coming from Emilia-Romagna region and the Czech Multimodal Journey Planner (IDOS). The integrated ticketing and fare system for all local and regional public transport and on the RER achieved in the Mi Muovo project is interesting for Calabria region which wants to increase the integrated use of public transport with other modes of transport (bike and car sharing, etc.). From the Czech Multimodal Journey Planner (IDOS), Calabria will try to replicate the possibility of providing reliable transport information to travellers and tourists. IDOS is a door-to-door journey planner for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, providing also cross-border travel connections around Europe by bus and train. The reason for the transferability of IDOS good practice is the flexibility and integration of service delivery.

Another POLITE partner – the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing (ILiM), is interested primarily in good practices related to providing information to travellers, secondly in practices for public transport priority and finally smart ticketing. Thus, lessons from POLITE will be used in the infomobility sections of the Polish national and 16 regional transport plans. ILiM is working on the Transportation Plan for Wielkopolska Region and is considering five of the collected in POLITE good practices. One of them is the SkyCash ticketing system which was adopted in Poznan thanks to contacts and exchanges which occurred in the course of POLITE. SkyCash is a mobile ticketing system for public transport and a range of other services such as mobile parking payments or buying entertainment tickets. SkyCash is described in more detail further on in this newsletter in the section presenting ILiM.

Consultation is held in context of the EU's ITS Directive in view of possible Commission specifications addressing the issue of provision of EU-wide real-time traffic information services. 

The Commission is seeking views in particular on:

• extent of the problem with existing services;
• assessment of scope for improvement;
• relevance and impacts of proposed options.

The results of this consultation will feed in into an on-going cost-benefit analysis.

The closing date is 14 March 2014.

The on-line consultation can be accessed via the following webpage: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes/its/consultations/2014-03-14-rtti_en.htm