Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are vital to increase safety and tackle Europe’s growing emission and congestion problems. They can make transport safer, more efficient and more sustainable by applying various information and communication technologies to all modes of passenger and freight transport. Moreover, the integration of existing technologies can create new services. ITS are key to support jobs and growth in the transport sector.

Against this background, the European Commission already took an important step towards the introduction and use of ITS in road transport in December 2008. The ITS Action Plan adopted on 16 December 2008 set out a series of targeted measures and a proposal for a Directive establishing the framework for their implementation. The aim was to create the necessary momentum to accelerate the market penetration of more mature ITS applications and services in Europe. The ITS Action Plan states: „Examples of applications of Intelligent Transport Systems in road transport include urban and motorway traffic management and control systems, electronic toll collection and route navigation“.

In order to accelerate the coordinated deployment of ITS, the Action Plan was further combined with a Directive to create a legal framework. This has obligations for Member States and specifications to be defined by the Commission together with the ITS Advisory Group. The Directive was approved by the Commission in July 2010 and published in the Official Journal of the European Union in August 2010.

To support the European Commission’s efforts promoting and accelerating the implementation of ITS across Europe, the EasyWay project was launched in 2007 with co-financing from the European Commission. Road authorities and road operators from 27 European countries teamed up to unlock the benefits of cooperation and harmonisation in the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) on Europe’s major road network, thus supporting transport policy objectives in terms of road safety, environmental impact of transport and mobility.

EasyWay was not only a deployment project, but also provided an efficient and unique platform enabling European mobility actors from 27 EU-member states to take a coordinated and harmonised approach to the provision of these pan-European ITS services. This was achieved through the development and agreement of a set of then called “EasyWay Deployment Guidelines”, which provided a common understanding of the nature of the core European ITS services and set clear objectives and requirements for their deployment and implementation.

This step was necessary and useful, as ITS deployments on the trans-European road network in general are carried out locally by single Member States following their national guidelines and policies, an overarching, cross-European harmonization and interoperability effort is crucial to exploit the full potential of seamless, continuous services throughout Europe. Only if this can be managed successfully, the amongst all Member States and the EC commonly shared objectives, which are the increase of safety and efficiency as well as the reduction of the transport related environmental impact, can be achieved in a sustainable way.

After the EasyWay project was completed in 2012, the EasyWay Deployment Guidelines were partially updated by the EIP / EIP+ projects and renamed to ITS Deployment Guidelines. Despite this high valuable and commonly accepted content the ITS deployment guidelines as they existed until 2020 have not yet the right format to achieve the above-mentioned goals. Therefore and in the light of recent European Delegated Regulations, as part of the „Activity 2 Monitoring and Dissemination“ of the EU EIP platform, a full revision of the format and the content of the whole set of Deployment Guidelines and simultaneously a bundling to a so-called „European ITS Service Deployment Reference Handbook“ was finally carried out. The set of before 19 separate ITS Deployment Guidelines and supporting documents were improved and compiled into one single document and in order to exploit their full potential finally attached as supplement to the throughout Europe legally binding European EU Delegated Regulations.

As both the EU Delegated Regulations and the ITS Deployment Guidelines are of great importance for the practical introduction and use of ITS services, they must not contradict each other but must be harmonised. As a consequence, for some Member States the translation of the national language is recommended, and important requirements should be included in the national ITS deployment guidelines. Additional teaching material needs to be extended for wider use.