38.1 million Italians they travel by road every day and do so on average for 47 km. According to some estimates They travel 1.8 billion kilometers every daywhich is equivalent to 12 times the distance between planet Earth and the Sun. Well the89% of Italians choose rubber over other forms of mobility (such as the plane and the train, which are chosen by 7% and 3% of people respectively). Goods also travel mainly along the Italian road and motorway network. It is estimated that every year 579 billion tons of goods are moved per kilometer And 84% of the total travels by road.
Given these data, it is clear that road transport is not substitutable and that this constitutes a important pillar in the life of practically each of us. That’s why there is an urgent need for solutions that make road and highway mobility safer and more sustainable. These include fleets of drones dedicated to traffic inspections and monitoring, and smart roads that will communicate with and assist increasingly autonomous vehicles.
But how can these technologies actually guarantee greater sustainability and such a high level of safety? The answer could be summed up in just one word: digitalization. This includes the collection and real-time analysis of large amounts of data and information, through which it will be possible automate operational processes and significantly improve the driving experience for motorists. What does this mean in practice? The adoption of digital solutions will allow us to monitor the conditions of the infrastructure (allowing us to carry out preventive maintenance), monitor traffic, manage its flows remotely with immediate alerts in the event of an emergency, use of speed control systems and safety distance between connected vehicles and eliminate human errors which, in 90% of cases, are the cause of accidents, too often attributable to distraction or bad conduct by motorists.
In what will effectively be a real mobility revolutionan important role will be played by the self-driving and semi-autonomous vehicles which in the coming years will also be increasingly present on the Italian motorway network. The latter will be completely automated and will thus be able to accommodate a greater number of vehicles thanks to the fact that traffic flows and speed will be monitored by road sensors which, thanks to 5G coverage along the entire motorway network, will be able to communicate with the self-driving systems of the cars offering a comfortable, as well as safe, travel experience.
In addition, vehicles that are equipped with a system artificial intelligencewill be able to communicate continuously with the infrastructure to receive updated information via radio or Wi-Fi on traffic conditions, weather conditions, recommended alternative routes, and so on.
All these technologies take us into a future that is now imminent. Autostrade per l’Italia, for example, is experimenting with the Falco program, a system that uses drones to send video streams in real time directly to the Radio Information Center, allowing the state of the road to be monitored and timely intervention to be taken, reducing intervention times by 50%. Smart Roads are also now a reality, a new way of conceiving mobility that, thanks to technological innovation, will allow dialogue between vehicles and the infrastructure for a safer and more sustainable travel experience.
The work of Autostrade per l’Italia together with other partners
Clearly the topic of road safety and environmental sustainability is quite complex, and requires the involvement of various technologies and professionals in the digital sector. This is why Autostrade per l’Italia has decided to address the topic using an interesting multidisciplinary approachasking for the support of a group of experts from the academic world, research and primary operators in the sector, including Eni, Snam, Aspi, Cdp, Enea, Rse, Cnr, Federico II University of Naples, Unicampania and the Polytechnic of Milan.
All these actors have worked together to contribute to the debate on the decisions to be taken and on the investments to be done for an adequate energy transition and to implement a process of strengthening and modernizing Italian highways.
This project gave birth to the work published by Il Sole 24 Ore entitled “The sustainable mobility revolution starts with highways. Safe, digital, decarbonized”from which some of the information in our article is taken. This work has focused on all the most relevant topics to identify solutions that can make the Italian motorway network safer and “greener”: from the limits and peculiarities of Italian motorways to technological innovations, through the rules for a new mobility model. An aspect particularly dear to Autostrade per l’Italia concerns the achievement of the decarbonisation and safety objectives set by the European Union. It is in fact “milestones” like these that stimulate the development of various solutions, such as autonomous driving, smart roads and alternative energy sources.
Understanding the macro-themes related to the sustainable mobility revolution using a logical narrative that allows you to get a concrete idea of how challenging it is to make road travel less impactful from an environmental point of view is an approach that can certainly raise awareness among public opinion and the Public Administration.
Starting from the numbers, the historical evolution of the Italian motorway network and its morphological characteristics, the book gradually addresses the possible solutions to the problem by illustrating how the digitalization of motorway infrastructures and the technological evolution concerning cars will have a decisive role in winning the challenge of sustainable mobility, also highlighting the aspects concerning energy vectors for the decarbonization of road transport, illustrating what investments have been made in this regard at a national level and illustrating the new rules for a new mobility model.
Since the book was born from the joint work of such important players (such as those mentioned above) its reading can provide a well-rounded idea on the theme of the sustainable mobility revolution.
What are Smart Roads and how do the smart roads of the future work?
A solution that is certainly worth aiming for, and which we have partially mentioned before, are the so-called Smart Roadswhich could potentially revolutionize the road transport sector. A “smart road” would in fact be able to integrate vehicle connectivity with other “smart” communication systems on board.
On the Autostrade per l’Italia network, Smart Roads are already active on 26 kilometers of the A1 Milan-Naples stretch between Florence South and Florence North, in both directions, and as many kilometers on the urban hub of Bologna, for a total of 52 kilometers of “smart road”. This is a new way of conceiving mobility: thanks to technological innovation and the dialogue between vehicles and infrastructure, roads and users are considered as a single interconnected space.
The development of Smart Roads facilitates the travel experience of self-driving vehicles, making it safer and more sustainable. The most important experiment in this area is the one launched by Autostrade per l’Italia and Movyon, a center of excellence for research and innovation of the Autostrade per l’Italia Group and leader in Intelligent Transport Systems services, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano, which saw a self-driving car for the first time in Italy travel on a stretch of highway with open traffic.
There autonomous driving and Smart Roads can play a crucial role in making future mobility safer and more sustainable. Today, a good portion of cars on the market, in fact, already integrate some driving assistance systems which, thanks to a series of sensors and of Actuators commanded by a computerized “brain”allow the car to perform some operations autonomously, such as maintaining the most suitable speedL’Driver inattention and fatigue warning; the Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) And Lane Keeping Assist (ELKS)just to name a few.
Technological evolution will lead vehicles to connect to the Smart Roads road infrastructure via wireless connections and by reading data from sensors and cameras on vehicles: valuable information for managing traffic in an eco-friendly way and for ensuring safe driving throughout the road network that has been subject to digitalization.
These systems, in fact, not only improve driving comfort but, even more importantly, minimize human errors (the main cause of accidents) thus increasing safety on board. It is no coincidence that the European Union has decided to make the presence of similar systems mandatory for newly approved cars starting from July 2022.
Integrating self-driving cars with digitalized highways could be the right “recipe” to achieve important goals in terms of safety and environmental sustainability. This is because traffic flows and speed will be monitored by road sensors which, communicating with the autonomous driving systems integrated into the cars, will make traffic flow smoother, reduce accidents eliminating human errors and reduce pollutant emissions by 10-20%.
