With an increasing number of cars connected to the Internet, road traffic is becoming smarter and smarter. Vehicle data form the basis of smart mobility applications concerning traffic safety and traffic efficiency. Without large amounts of data from vehicles and cell phones hitching a ride, road authorities such as Rijkswaterstaat would be much less able to provide road users with up-to-date traffic information. However, hardly anything is coming of the most talked-about form of smart mobility. Cars that talk to each other and automatically adapt to each other are still a rarity. Primary obstacle: motorists' privacy is insufficiently protected.
There are few areas of the Internet of Things where expectations are as high as for smart mobility. Just imagine: vehicles that automatically adjust to each other's position and speed, optimal traffic flow on highways that puts an end to the congestion problem, detected danger on the road that translates into a warning on the dashboard within seconds, only a minuscule number of traffic accidents and a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions from cars. Who wouldn't sign up for it? The European Commission has long since done so. It firmly believes that smart, data-driven technological applications in road traffic will lead to enormous improvements within a few decades.
Smart mobility sounds hip, but the road ahead is long, bumpy and uphill. It is a very extensive and tough dossier that requires a great deal of coordination between EU countries and in which it takes years to reach agreements on technical standards, the use and sharing of data and, for example, the privacy of motorists. With many hundreds of trials and pilots in the field of smart traffic in recent years, the Netherlands presents itself as one of the frontrunners in Europe. (1) Dozens of Rijkswaterstaat projects testing smart traffic solutions are still ongoing. (2)
Everything depends on data. Data from cars and data from devices that 'hitch a ride' in cars: especially cell phones but also boxes and dongles that are installed in a vehicle 'afterwards' for trip and driving style registration. The data coming directly from vehicles (the first category (3)) has to do with road safety. Car manufacturers are required to share so-called "Safety Related Traffic Information" (SRTI) with road authorities. (4)
If many vehicles report that in one particular location the shock absorbers are bulging, there is almost certainly a pothole or hole in the road surface. Is there massive braking where it usually never happens? Then there is most likely something on the road. No lane assist for some time? Possibly the lines are out of order. Does the ABS kick in with one car after another? Perhaps there is black ice, there is oil on the asphalt or the road surface is worn. Such information enables Rijkswaterstaat to take faster and more targeted action.
The second data category relates to traffic intensity. This is not real vehicle data, but mainly location data with a time stamp that comes from navigation apps on cell phones. (5) From these, it can be deduced how busy it is somewhere. Parties like Google and TomTom sell that data on in real time to road authorities. Whereas these providers of navigation services know exactly where you drive (to), and the same applies to car manufacturers if you allow sharing data with them (which is not an obligation!), road authorities cannot infer that from the aggregated and anonymized datasets of those companies.
Although motorists are, at least on paper, masters of their vehicle data (6), in practice others often make use of it without motorists benefiting from it. In the smart mobility applications that have already been put into practice, the situation is clearly different. The data follows a circular path: it returns to the road user in the form of traffic information and customized services. Still, there is something bittersweet about this because you sometimes pay for it twice: with your (personal) data anyway and - if a particular service has a price tag - also with your wallet.
The method whereby vehicle and location data first pass through various parties and then end up back with motorists has already proven itself, but traffic will only really become smart once these intermediate stages can be omitted and vehicles start communicating directly with each other on a large scale (Vehicle-to-Vehicle, V2V). Then they will keep each other informed of speeds, distances and, for example, danger on the road, and automatically convert that information into a desired action: accelerate, brake and/or steer. As a result, mainly on highways, they are able to drive much closer together(platooning (7)) and the capacity of the roads can be used more efficiently.
However, this smartest form of smart mobility is hardly getting off the ground. Not least because it requires cars with a high degree of autonomy, and none of the approved models have yet achieved that. While the car industry is fully committed to driver assistance systems and self-driving capability, the expensive development of "cooperative driving" is a step too far for most manufacturers due to a lack of a convincing revenue model. In Europe, only Volkswagen has really addressed this: certain VW models are capable of sending alerts to each other.
The European Commission is much more enthusiastic about Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS (8)) than the auto industry. However, a Commission proposal to make cooperative driving equipment mandatory in vehicles was rejected by EU countries in 2019. (9) Legislation that could have provided a breakthrough has thus failed to materialize. This is because many EU countries favor 5G over Wi-Fi as a communication technology for cooperative driving (10) and - more importantly - the European privacy watchdog has already drawn a line under the privacy safeguards proposed by the Commission regarding C-ITS years ago. (11)
Cooperative driving in fact works on the basis of the untargeted broadcasting of open messages. Cars participating in it constantly shout, "here I am, here I am, here I am. This massive dissemination of location data and thus personal data must be handled much more carefully than the Commission intended, according to the privacy watchdog. However, the fundamental technical adjustments that the regulator demanded seven years ago now in order to eliminate the lack of privacy by design and make cooperative driving fully a reality are still pending. Due to unwillingness on the part of various parties, this file is at an impasse. When this will end is unclear.
Some progress does exist in the area of communication between modern cars and certain digital infrastructure on the roadside (Vehicle to Infrastructure and Infrastructure to Vehicle, V2I and I2V). Consider, for example, arrow cars that warn approaching traffic of road works. (12) In this form of smart traffic, the privacy of motorists is much less at stake. However, this is the case with smart traffic lights (13) that change color at a more convenient time based on (mobile) phones in cars letting drivers know they are on their way. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens has been concerned for years that municipalities using such traffic control devices, and thus processing personal data, are not complying with the AVG (14).
All things considered, traffic at home and abroad is getting a little smarter, but until some significant stumbling blocks regarding cooperative driving (V2V) are removed, the ultimate form of smart mobility remains a speck on the horizon.
(1) https://dutchmobilityinnovations.com/organisatie-smart-mobility
(2) https://www.magazinesrijkswaterstaat.nl/smartmobility/2022/03/projecten-smart-mobility-wegverkeer
(3) https://www.magazinesrijkswaterstaat.nl/smartmobility/2021/02/de-potentie-van-probe-vehicle-data
(4) https://www.eumonitor.nl/9353000/1/j9vvik7m1c3gyxp/vjs5ga5k2ixs
(5) https://www.magazinesrijkswaterstaat.nl/zakelijkeninnovatie/2022/02/floating-car-data
(6) https://privacyfirst.nl/artikelen/connected-cars-en-privacy-wie-zit-er-in-de-drivers-seat/
(7) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(automobile)
(8) https://www.car-2-car.org/about-c-its/
(9) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/NL/TXT/HTML/?uri=PI_COM:C(2019)1789
(11) https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/document.cfm?doc_id=47888
(12) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTDdHzpR5Iw
(14) https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/uploads/2024-04/Brief%20AP%20over%20volgverkeerslichten.pdf
