Impact evaluation activity
The objective of this Activity was to evaluate the impact of the Action against a set of performance indicators meant to qualify ITS deployment agreed by the European Commission.The impact of ITS deployments can be measured at two levels: for a single deployment, or at Corridor level. For the evaluation activity, beneficiaries produced two kinds of deliverables, reflecting these two levels: individual Impact Evaluation reports for certain single deployments, and an overall Impact Evaluation report at Corridor level.In order to deliver the Final Evaluation Report, the following tasks were achieved:
The individual projects evaluated were the following:
CEF16_FRA-1
Central Traffic Management Control centre enhancement
Entire AREA network
385
CEF16_FRA-4
ASF
Enhancement of traffic monitoring: Deployment of traffic monitoring gantries and system on ASF network
A7, A8, A89 East, A63, A62
206
CEF16_FRA-8
Dynamic signalisation and traveller information
Entire ATMB network
126
CEF16_FRA-15
Traffic and event management information through mobile phone
A8
200
CEF16_ITA-01
ADF-A6 TO-SV
Upgrade of traffic information systems in tunnels
A6
124
CEF16_ITA-03
Installation of VMSs in tunnels
CEF16_ITA-13
SALT_Tronco Autocisa
Intelligent transport systems for traffic and emergency management in motorway tunnels
A15
100
CEF16_ITA-15
SALT
A12, A11, A15
155
CEF16_SEO-2
SEOPAN / AUCAT
Safety ITS Deployment in Tunnels
C-32
60
CEF16_POR-03
Lusoponte, BCR, IP, Ascendi BLA, Ascendi CP
Enhancement of traffic management and information systems and equipment
A1, A2, A3, A6, A12, A20, A26/IC33, IP1, A25
920
CEF16_POR-06
Lusoponte, IP
Traffic Control Centre Upgrade
A12, A20, A26/IC33, IP1
83
Nevertheless, some of them, which relate to the same field have been grouped, as for Italy (ITA-01 + ITA-03) and Portugal (POR-03 + POR-06).
This list has been established to cover a variety of MedTIS III deployments. It contains projects on all four Member States where the Action is implemented, addresses Road Safety, Traffic Management and Traveller Information services, and covers various site configurations that are considered as sensitive sections of the MedTIS III network: tunnels, cross-border sections, urban areas, and bottleneck sections. The selection also covers a variety of solutions: new generation sensors and equipments to detect incidents and qualify traffic conditions in real-time, especially in tunnels, new software using, in particular artificial intelligence, at Traffic Control Centres to analyse data and help decision-making for road operators, on board information systems, VMS and other dynamic signing solutions for motorway access controland to disseminate real-time travel information, amongst others.
For Individual projets Evaluations, and in line with the main objectives of MedTIS III, the benefits evaluations mainly focused on the impact of each project in terms of safety, congestion and CO2 emissions. The benefits evaluations are ex-post or ex-ante evaluations, or sometimes a mix of ex-post and ex-ante, depending on the date of operational achieving of the project and its operating time available to exploit the corresponding data.
Impact measurements have been carried out mainly using EU EIP indicators, such as Change in accident numbers and severity, Change in traffic flow/change in bottleneck congestion, Change in CO2 emissions.
For those individual projects, applying at specific spots on corridor routes, and according to the data availability, a “Before and After Deployment” approach has been used. It consists in comparing Real Traffic and Safety figures for the periods “before and After implementation and to complete these real data, when necessary by estimated data.
The different impacts of each project has been calculated by using concrete figures reflecting the reduction in congestion volumes or the safety improvement, such as lost hours savings, CO2 emissions volumes savings or accident figures savings.
The monetarization of safety savings has been calculated from costs presented in “EC Handbook on the external costs of transport” (version 2019); the monetarization of congestion savings has been calculated from costs issued by the DOT of beneficiaries; the monetarization of CO2 or fuel savings is based on the market prices.
A comparison between yearly cost savings due to system implementation and full costs of the system (investment + maintenance,) has been delivered in order to calculate the ROI of the project.
At the Corridor level and for a global program evaluation, MedTIS III partners have decided to deliver on overall view on all deployment and benefit KPIs.
The impact assessment must be based on a comparison between the situations observed in 2018 (before project implementation), and in 2021 and beyond (after implementation of the project).
That impact assessment is presented under two angles:
For Deployment KPIs, as already done in MedTIS II and, in order to deliver a more concrete view on the kind of equipment and services deployed through the network, road operators have established two Level of Service situations, one in 2018, showing the LoS of MedTIS III network at the end of MedTIS II, before the start of the Action, and one in 2021, showing the LoS at the end of the Action. Each section of the network is described using a ranking scale from 0 (nothing is implemented) to 3 ( High level and sophisticated Traffic information and traffic management), as described in the evaluation report. The evolutions between 2018 and 2021 on MedTIS III network are materialized in 2 Level Of Service maps, in the Final evaluation report.
Regarding Benefit KPIs, each road operator has recovered real or rebuilt data for 2018.
Consolidated data for the whole network in 2021 were not yet available and it was not always possible to isolate the impact of the Action from other factors that could affect KPIs. Thus, it was decided to make an estimation of the impact of the Action at Corridor level. Therefore, the Benefit evaluation at Corridor Level performed is an ex-ante evaluation, based on an innovative methodology, successfully used in MedTISII.
That innovative method, seeks to respond to the commitment of verifying, by a socio-economic analysis, that MedTIS III program fully responds to the objectives assigned in terms of congestion reduction, environmental impact, and safety improvement; and with a good level of economic balance of investments. The results must be concrete, significant and meaningful for decision-makers and stakeholders.
Moreover, the methodology should rely on as most individual deployments as possible, and allow the measurement of impacts common to all of them and significant for the entire program.
Overall and considering individual deployments of MedTIS III Action, the operational and practical impact of most of the projects deployed in MedTIS III program is to shorten response times in the case of an event or accident (Nearly 75% of the total number of projects)
That is due to:
These projects therefore make it possible to reduce the occurrence of secondary accidents.
Indeed, by alerting drivers approaching the primary accident, these ITS systems contribute to more prepare them to avoid a secondary accident.
In fact and to summarize, the operational goal sought by the operators in deploying these projects is to improve the alert time and the response time in case of incident or accident, and thus reduce the occurrence of secondary accidents.
As presented in the Evaluation report, the realistic estimation of the reduction of secondary accidents numbers due to the project deployment, allows to calculate the impact of the program, at corridor level.against the same set of indicators, used for individual projects evaluation : safety improvement measured in secondary accidents occurrence reduction, congestion reduction measured in lost hours volume savings, or environmental impact measures in CO2 emisisons volumes savings.
The monetarization of safety savings has been calculated from costs presented in “EC Handbook on the external costs of transport” (version 2019); the monetarization of congestion savings has been calculated from costs issued by the DOT of beneficiaries; the monetarization of CO2 or fuel savings is based on the market prices.A comparison between yearly cost savings due to system implementation and full investment costs of the system has been delivered in order to calculate the ROI of the project.
MedTIS III Corridor contributed strongly to the EU-EIP Platform, particularly in the evaluation group and the cross corridor cooperation group.Project has continually interfaced with the EU ITS Platform with a continuous communication or monitoring and results of the evaluation.
The evaluation methodology developed in the frame of MedTIS III has been presented to the EU EIP members and has been adopted by most of them for their overall corridor evaluations, demonstrating a fruitful cross fertilization.
A calculation model for building the missing evaluation data has been developed in the frame of MedTIS III and has been put at disposal of all EU EIP members. As example, that model has also been used for Arc Atlantique III evaluation.
MedTIS III partners have contributed to structure European monitoring and provided appropriate data to the EU ITS Platform.Data to deliver consolidated results to the EU ITS Platform have been collected and processed, to then deliver consolidated results for the overall corridors via the EU ITS Platform.
MedTIS III road operators have complied with the ITS Deployment Guidelines of the EU ITS Platform. Road operators will pursue the objective of delivering the most relevant and quality-driven ITS services towards EU road users.
In that sense MedTIS III partners monitor the ITS Deployment Guidelines implementations and report to the EU ITS Platform as part of the Impact Evaluation activity.
On cross corridor cooperation, ITS Deployment Corridors have successfully been established as an instrument to implement EU transport policy regarding ITS on roads. ITS deployment on European
Scale requires a European level harmonisation layer, which is implemented by the European ITS Platform (EU EIP). But on top of that, practitioners in the ITS corridors are interested in direct, working level cooperation with other corridors or projects regarding concrete ITS deployment activities.
Thus, MedTIS III team was deeply involved in the work of the CCC EU EIP group to present its working methods and the results obtained, particularly in terms of program evaluations and in terms of best practices deployed. 5 Best practices have been delivered to the EU EIP platform, in the frame of “best practices dissemination”.
On the other hand, the highlights of the main projects of MedTIS III have been established and communicated to the EU EIP platform, for the purpose of a good cross-communication of the results obtained.
Download here the full report: 2016-EU-TM-0588-W_MedTIS 3_Evaluation Report VDEF
