Development of regional co-operation in traffic management

Traffic and mobility management is a fast developing area at the moment. Increasing traffic volumes, limited resources for infrastructure investments and the need to restrain climate chance are all creating pressure to manage traffic demand and network use. The aim of this project was to study, what is an appropriate model for the co-operation of regional traffic management officials for the Finland's biggest cities. Another aim was to present, how traffic management should be connected to regional traffic system planning. Also best practises in chosen themes were studied. The state-of-the-art study shows, that the most commonly developed services are real-time monitoring of public transport and electronic database of the public road works. Multimodal internet-portals are also coming in the near future. Slowly advancing services are road telematics plans of urban main roads and public transport incident information services. According to the study, the needs for traffic management are similar in the biggest cities. As the result of the project, a general co-operation model was developed, however, the model needs to be adapted to local resources and existing organisations. In the core of the model is the Traffic and mobility management executive group, which gathers all key officials. The task of the executive group is to take in use new methods and systems that aim to improve the daily operation of the traffic system and to promote the use of sustainable traffic modes. The regional co-operation in traffic management connects to other planning tasks in jointly created analyses and planning workshops. The deployment of four-step principle in Finnish planning culture requires new organisation of cooperation, resources and information management. Co-operation in traffic and mobility management differs from the co-operation in infrastructure planning in means of organisations, reaction speed and the extent of the applicable means. This report may be found at http://www.mintc.fi/oliver/upl999-LVM59_2007.pdf