The societal impact of ITS Chapter | 12 137diseases in the EU directive of 2014 since it has been connected with road-
traffic accidents.
According to Commission’s estimates, “25,500 people lost their lives on
EU roads in 2016 [...]. A further 135,000 people were seriously injured.”
Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc is worried about road fatalities and
invited all stakeholders to work on reducing the number of deadly road accidents
in 2020 to the half compared to 2010. In addition, the European Commission
estimated that every year economic damage of 174 Billion € is caused by car
accidents with human responsibilities.
Thus, making reliable and robust cost-efficient automated vehicles available
to a broad range of customers offers strong potential to reduce the repairable eco-
nomic and nonrepairable human damages. Highly automated vehicles also have
the potential to greatly increase road capacity, reducing the time that people spend
in traffic and reduce the environmental impact. In addition, productivity can go up,
since people traveling in autonomous vehicles can work while being transported.
12.2.3 Accessibility and capacity of traffic
The main societal impacts of the automation that ITS introduce are related to
enhancing traffic safety and improved-traffic efficiency. Research on the safety-
related benefits from automated driving is still at its beginning, but the results are
already very promising. According to a VTT study for Finland, traffic safety is
expected to increase with the advent of automation and the respective impact on
traffic flow is expected to be positive at automation level 3 and above. According
to the study of the European Transport Safety Council (Townsend, 2016), auton-
omous vehicles of level 3 will improve the throughput of the network and the
traffic efficiency allowing vehicles to move faster and safer in waves of con-
trolled speed. Even from autonomy level 2, improved safety will reduce traffic
disruptions and congestion, positively affecting the transport system. Virtual
patrolling is expected to predict or early detect accidents, and vehicle break-
down events, thus alerting drivers and automated vehicles that can avoid queu-
ing and congestion. This will significantly reduce the ratio of incident-related
traffic which is estimated to be one-fourth of the total traffic on road networks.
The technologies brought about by ITS target to increase efficiency in the
use of automated driving on all kinds of roads, that is, motorways, rural roads,
and also in the urban environment. The efficiency increase is achieved by two
factors—(1) ease of access to transportation infrastructure and services built
upon and (2) building new applications based on existing application verticals
by sharing transportation infrastructure. It can be seen as a further means to sup-
port the digitalization of society. With half of the world’s population living in
large cities, and an expected rise to 70% in the next 30 years, the development
of smart cities, where ITS will facilitate urban mobility is expected to boost
the economic development of urban centers, which today produce 70% of the
world’s gross-domestic product.