Portugal invests €8 million in intelligent highways

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Portugal is to invest €8 million in intelligent roads on the back of EU funding through its Project C Roads. The aim is to cut the number of road traffic accidents and deaths by 2050 as well as reducing exhaust emissions.

 

Cars, lorries and coaches all connected and fitted with autonomous driving technology will begin circulating on Portuguese roads from next year onwards.

Portugal will invest €8.35 million by the end of 2020 to get the test vehicles on the road and communicating with each other and the road infrastructure. With 50% funding from Brussels, the C-Roads Intelligent Roads project will function along 1000km of the Portuguese motorways. The aim is to slash the number or road deaths and reduce exhaust emissions, easing traffic jams by 2050. IP – Infrastructures of Portugal presented the aims of the initiative at an International Conference on Road Safety in Almada this week.

“Over 90% of accidents are down to human error and the infrastructure should minimise the consequences of these errors. We have to invest in a new generation of roads and reduce the number of deaths to zero by 2050”, says Ana Tomaz, Director of the IP’s Road Safety Department.

Now with 16 European States participating as core members including Portugal, the C-Roads Platform approach will increasingly pursue cooperation on a holistic level in order to cover all dimensions linked with the deployment of C-ITS (Cooperative, Connected and Automated Ability – Intelligent Transport System), such as sharing experiences and knowledge regarding deployment and implementation issues as well as user acceptance.

National C-ITS pilots are linked to the C-Roads Platform and are to be regarded as the starting point for pan-European C-ITS implementation. The national pilot initiatives will move on to cross-site testing, which will allow them to grow together and achieve transnational interoperability. In this way the C-Roads Platform will ensure European cohesion of C-ITS deployment across Europe with regards to a full roll-o