Skip to main content

ITS will help ‘fifth generation’ roads offer pan-European solution

The next generation of roads - the ‘fifth generation’ - will provide the world’s highway authorities with a big leap forward, delegates to the recent European Road Conference heard. Adewole Adesiyun, deputy secretary general at the Brussels-based Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL), said a paradigm shift is taking place, offering “solutions to existing and future problems with new ways to use smart, intelligent and dynamic technologies”. The first four generations of roa
December 21, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

The next generation of roads - the ‘fifth generation’ - will provide the world’s highway authorities with a big leap forward, delegates to the recent European Road Conference heard.

Adewole Adesiyun, deputy secretary general at the Brussels-based Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL), said a paradigm shift is taking place, offering “solutions to existing and future problems with new ways to use smart, intelligent and dynamic technologies”.  

The first four generations of roads, he told the 500-plus delegates at the conference in Dubrovnik, organised by IRF Global and the European Union Road Federation, were: “the track, the paved road, the smooth road and the motorway”.

He added: “The fifth generation road will offer long-term pan-European solution,” with new approaches to “the maintenance of existing highways and the building of new roads” … plus news ways to manage “lower whole-life costs”.

Highways agencies around the world need to start thinking as broadly as possible today about how they are going to invest for tomorrow, agreed speaker after speaker at the recent event.

If we don’t get to grips with the generation 5 road, disaster looms. “Despite new and disruptive technologies, transport infrastructure and logistics operations remain critical for developed nations,” Adesiyun told the conference.

“Daily congestion causes an economic loss equivalent to around 1% of Europe’s GDP … circa €200 billion annually. And things like extreme weather events are estimated to cost the European Union’s transport system at least €15 billion each year. Other infrastructure and interdependency is critical.”

This forever-open, self-healing road will “integrate innovation in infrastructure, vehicle technology and intelligent transport systems”, Adesiyun said. And there will probably be three iterations: “The adaptable road, the automated road; and the resilient road.”

Related Content

  • January 25, 2018
    Enforcement ensures equity for toll road users
    All-electronic tolling boosts traffic flow but introduces the tricky question of enforcement. Workable solutions are starting to emerge. Enforcement is an essential part of tolling and one of the most important ways for a mobility agency to keep faith with its investors, its community stakeholders and the vast majority of its users. It can also be one of the most unpopular and contentious things a toll authority has to undertake. If tolling is about paying for the roads, then everyone has to pay their
  • June 17, 2019
    Battery bottleneck: EV roll-out at risk
    In order for the take-up of electric vehicles – a key part of the future mobility mix - to grow, we need batteries. And that might prove tricky, reports Graham Anderson Industry and commodities experts fear that the growth in electric vehicles (EVs) could be much slower than predicted due to bottlenecks in global battery market supply chains. “People seem to think that the switch from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles just means you plug your car in rather than fill it with petrol,” a
  • June 25, 2018
    Cost benefit analysis ‘can’t be carried out with a cookbook’
    There is far more to working out the worth of a project than simply filling in a few headings on a spreadsheet. David Crawford surveys some recent thinking from the US and Canada. Cost benefit analysis (CBA) “can’t be carried out with a cookbook”, warns US analyst Professor Robert J Brent. “ You can’t just get out a spreadsheet and fill in the data for all the headings. Each transport CBA should have something that is distinctive, in terms of location (for example, for a rural area), types of user
  • August 21, 2018
    Helsinki’s residents trial MaaS as alternative to private cars
    Would you give up your own car? Helsinki implemented MaaS late last year and Colin Sowman discovers that the initial reaction has been positive What would it take for you to give up your own car? That is the question posed by Sampo Hietanen, the so-called ‘father’ of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and CEO of MaaS Global. And he is about to discover if MaaS really will convince the people of Helsinki to do the unthinkable. MaaS Global introduced a fledgling version of its Whim app in the city in late 2016