European Commission ITS Action Plan supports eCall deployment

Creation date: 05 March 2009

On 16 December 2008, the European Commission published the European Commission Action Plan for the Deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems in Europe.

The ITS Action Plan underlines the role that Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can play to deliver clean, efficient, safe and secure road transport and it aims to accelerate and coordinate the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in road transport, including interfaces with other transport modes and to create a consistent and comprehensive policy framework, to unlock the full potential of ITS in serving European and national policies.

In order to reach these objectives the EC identified six priority areas for actions and road safety and security is one of them. Although safety and security-related systems have already proven their effectiveness when deployed, further development and coordinated efforts still need to be considered to foster their wide scale deployment and installation in new vehicles. eCall deployment is one of the actions included in the road safety and security area.

As clearly demonstrated by a number of recent studies, eCall is one of the most effective safety systems that can be deployed. eCall will improve the whole emergency rescue chain: it will provide accurate location of the accident, reduce the communication delay by immediately sending the necessary information to the most appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), and by allowing the PSAP operator to immediately dispatch the emergency services to the correct location.

The Action Plan underlines the utmost importance of the implementation platform for the harmonised introduction of pan-European eCall, including awareness campaigns, upgrading Public Safety Access Points’ infrastructures and and an assessment of the need for regulation.

For more information on the ITS Action Plan please click here.