Intelligent Transport Solutions (ITS) and cooperative ITS (C-ITS) offer many benefits, such as increased transport efficiency and road safety by informing drivers of suitable routes or dangers ahead them on the road; by informing traveler of the best travel options and multi-modal connections; and logistics companies about traffic flow status on planned routes.
Educating stakeholders of ITS and C-ITS benefits is of essence if these benefits are to be leveraged. CAPITAL has therefore developed a set of training courses, based on both traditional classroom training as well as MOOC business model (massive open online courses) offering training on the deployment of ITS. Concretely, the project has addressed following objectives:
Objective 1: Create a platform of practitioners in the public and private sector in the field of (Cooperative) ITS deployment by establishing synergies with existing regional, European and international activities.
Achievement: Through face-to-face training events, online training platform, webinars, advisory group and broad dissemination of its results, consortium has developed a platform of practitioners of ITS and C-ITS. A CAPITAL stakeholder matrix, as living document, is presented as annex in the deliverable D2.1 and provides in the first step the relevant stakeholder networks, platforms, key stakeholders that can be reached within the CAPITAL network. A concrete stakeholder database has been implemented in the second part of the period as part of the platform development. The students enrolled to the online courses, are part of the international community built within the project. To complete the strategy and strengthening the built community, the ambassador’s role has been added for advocating the benefits of CAPITAL outcome.
Objective 2: Identify and assess the capacity needs and knowledge gaps and constraints of the practitioners in the field of (Cooperative) ITS.
Achievement: Numerous stakeholders (i.a. 117 respondents from 23 different countries in an online-survey, 9 ITS experts and the consortium members itself) have been involved in the project’s assessment of the capacity needs. The whole approach, results and recommendations are described in report “Capacity needs and knowledge gaps of ITS stakeholder groups and case studies collection”.
Objective 3: Develop an ITS deployment transferability handbook of case studies (including their respective business models and value propositions) and support decision making process for deploying C‐ITS.
Achievement: This objective has been met (and overachieved) through development of the D2.3 Transferability handbook deliverable. The number of best practices collected was 36, which is well above the “minimum 10 good practices” which were stated in the original grant agreement. Furthermore, adding the online version of the transferability handbook makes the entire experience of searching for best ITS and C-ITS practices more user friendly.
Objective 4: Design, implement and assess the collaborative capacity‐building programme in 6 European cities.
Achievement: As a part of designing the collaborative capacity-building programme 9 specific training programmes have been developed and delivered in 8 European cities (Turin, Lahti, Split, Newcastle, Athens, Helmond, Vigo and Rome). This has also been complemented by the usage of the CAPITAL online training platform which has attracted more than 500 users to follow 1200+ training programmes.
Objective 5: Develop a user awareness strategy and promote dissemination and awareness of ITS benefits to public and private stakeholders.
Achievement: In the second reporting period communication and dissemination activities have been further strengthened. Communication and dissemination of the project was done through dissemination tools, such as the website, promotional video, e-learning platform, printed material as well as participation in showcases in Europe and China. All of these activities have contributing to further strengthen the community that has been established. In total the project has reached out to an estimated 176.000 persons.
