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y summer party is about to begin, and I am nervous. I ordered everything online. I am now looking at a graphene map I have laid out. A few green dots are still approaching my location. My guests do not know where they are headed. The invitation included a ticket for a pick-up service. Everyone was picked up from their home to be transported here in a shared robotic shuttle. I may be the only one in the bunch who still drives a conventional car. There would not be space for many cars to park here anyway. Parking spaces in towns have also begun to disappear as demand for responsive transport, robotic transport, and telepresence have increased”. This is a picture painted by technological visionary Risto Linturi in his Traffic Data Visions report for the Finnish Transport Agency. His vision of 2030 may not be very far from reality. Google and Tesla have shown the way for “no-hands” driving. Autonomous vehicles that use their own sensors to observe their surroundings have been an everyday phenomenon for a while. An indicator light comes on to warn drivers of slippery road surfaces. “Robotic cars are the highest level of automated vehicles. Transport as we know it will have been completely transformed 50 years from now”, explains Project Manager Ilkka Kotilainen from the Finnish Transport Agency. Vehicles are rapidly becoming more technologically advanced thanks to digitalisation. They already feature a large number of sensors that allow the in-car computer to detect changes in the car and its surroundings. A study on a metropolitan vision for automated transport calculated that driverless robotic cars could save several billions of euros per year in Finland in the 2020s and as much as EUR 100 billion per year by the following decade. Technological visionary Risto Linturi also points out that the annual costs of road traffic accidents are estimated at approximately EUR 2 billion.
Safety first The Nordic countries launched the three-year NordicWay pilot project as part of the EU’s Connecting Europe programme in the summer of 2015. The aim is to prepare for the adoption of the European Union’s ITS Directive, as its regulations on provision of safety-related traffic information, which is vital for traffic safety, will enter into force in the next few years. “The pilot project also helps to pave the way for road transport automation”, says Ilkka Kotilainen. The Directive is designed to increase the safety of pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users. It identifies eight types of safety messages concerning various dangers of road transport, six of which are being tested in Finland: unprotected accident sites, animals or objects on the road, unmanaged blockage of a road, exceptional weather conditions, reduced visibility and short-term road works. “Almost three hundred people in Finland and a total of approximately 25,000 people in Europe die in road traffic accidents every year”, says Kotilainen to explain the significance of the pilot project in reducing the number of accidents. According to him, human error is the cause of 80% of all traffic accidents. For as long as there is a human behind the wheel, transport can never be completely safe. The project is led by the Finnish Transport Agency together with the Finnish Transport Safety Agency. VTT was chosen to carry out an impact assessment on the pilot. HERE, a mapping business recently sold by Nokia to the German car manufacturers Audi, BMW and Daimler, has developed an application for the project and is leading a consortium comprising HERE as well as Nokia, Elisa, Infotripla and Solita. The project is due to be completed and its findings reported by the end of 2017. Cooperative cars There is nothing new about sending safety messages as such. Drivers have got used to radio programmes being interrupted by news VTT Impulse 49