NEXT-ITS 2 Evaluation Report

The NEXT-ITS 2 project contains a number of measures deployed on the NEXT-ITS 2 corridor and in traffic management centres in order to move from local traffic management towards coordinated and cross-border management of the whole corridor. The evaluation performed has covered the services deployed or enhanced by the road authorities involved during the period 2015-2017, also including some measures completed fully in early 2018. The objective has primarily been to evaluate the costs and impacts of the services deployed i.e. how the measures contribute to reduction in travel time, accidents and emissions from road transport.The total length of the NEXT-ITS corridor itself is about 3 000 km, but the impacts of the NEXT-ITS 2 measures cover a much larger road network, about 25 000 km. This is due to the fact that many measures focus on improving the effectiveness and quality of traffic centre operations. In the participating countries, the traffic management centres of the road authorities provide their services on the whole comprehensive TEN-T network, and even wider, on the whole main road network including the arterials to the bigger cities connected by the main road networks.Hence, in order to cover all benefits of the measures in a fair way, also the contribution of the NEXT-ITS 2 measures to solving transport problems outside the actual corridor have been taken into account. As the contribution of the measures to the effectiveness of existing ITS services varies by measure and type of service, the road network affected by the service had to be separated in several different sub-networks in some countries to be able to estimate the impacts of NEXT-ITS 2 as correctly as possible. In these cases, the impacts were first calculated separately for each sub-network, and then summed up for all networks impacted by NEXT-ITS 2 measures in the countries.The evaluation was carried out as an ex-ante evaluation, taking the estimated impacts of the measures into account. The assessed impacts of the deployed services on the NEXT-ITS 2 corridor and networks are based on experience from the impact assessment studies available for the traffic management and information services deployed and enhanced via the measures implemented in 2015-2017. While taking into account the results from existing studies, especially from regions outside NEXT-ITS, the results were adapted somewhat in order to consider the differences in traffic and environmental conditions between the ones in the impact studies and the ones prevailing on the NEXT-ITS 2 networks.The total estimated effects of the services are considerable, about 490 000 vehicle hours driven less and circa 135 000 vehicle hours less spent in congestion annually. About three severe accidents and 11 000 tonnes of CO2 emissions are avoided annually due to NEXT-ITS 2. The total value of the annual benefits in 2017 will be circa 15 Million €, which can be compared to the implementation costs of circa 33 million € including VAT and thereby comparable to the benefits (the costs without VAT amount to almost 27 Million €). As the annual operation and maintenance costs will be in the order of 3 Million €, the NEXT-ITS 2 can be assessed to be socio-economically profitable.The sensitivity analysis shows that the benefits calculated vary a lot dependant on the most important input parameters. However, it can be concluded that even with conservative estimates, NEXT-ITS 2 has a positive net impact.It needs to be pointed out that the effect estimates are based on a desk-top analysis, which needs to be compared to the actual statistics from the NEXT-ITS 2 corridor and the national networks affected. Such an ex-post evaluation should be carried out when the services are fully deployed and in use, for instance in 2019.However, it is clear that the effects of the services are extremely difficult to measure especially in this era of technology disruption due to connected and automated driving, the internet of things, digitalisation, etc. Thereby, even the ex-post evaluation needs to be accompanied with a desk-top analysis similar to the ex-ante assessment reported here.Overall, the general conclusion is that the ITS investments are profitable for the society