Verkehrsauskunft Österreich –VAO (Traffic Information Austria) A Sound Basis for Future Proof Intermodal Traffic Information Services

In 2008 in Austria a huge number of national or international service providers offered traffic information services. These services covered single different modes, were restricted to different regions, provided services of different quality, used different ways to display traffic situations and did, altogether, not provide consistent, reliable traffic information. In this situation the Austrian “Klima- und Energie Fonds” (fund for climate and energy) decided to call for tenders to implement one single, intermodal traffic information platform for Austria that should integrate approved traffic information of all modes of transport provided by the major traffic infrastructure providers and traffic service providers. Since 2009 VAO – “Verkehrsauskunft Osterreich” (Austrian Traffic Information), the winning consortium, is building up this harmonized traffic information platform step by step. This comprises filling traffic detection gaps, defining traffic models, setting up concentrators for time tables and traffic data, deploying an improved, multi modal routing technology and finally implementing a new high quality end user traffic information service. Besides these technical aspects the consortium has to align their traffic information strategies and to face legal and organisational challenges to actually being able to operate this area wide, inter modal traffic information platform.