Cooperative systems roll-out in Austria and Middle-Germany: Key impacts on environment-first calculations

This paper presents climate-related target impacts from simulation studies in two complementary large-scale regional initiatives on cooperative systems (I2V) within the currently emerging European context. The innovative value-added is to share early results and approaches from rather complementary regional initiatives-in a level of detail that we have not seen anywhere else-for cross-fertilization and harmonization with other teams. In Austria the driving element for setting-up a large-scale cooperative services field test has been the newly emerging opportunity to directly communicate with car drivers in contexts when public transport offers an attractive alternative (thus reducing CO₂ emission). Rather soon-while setting-up the field test-it became clear that cooperative services (EASYWAY set) have not only a significant potential in terms of increasing efficiency but also in terms of effectively coping with severe weather conditions. MOSAIQUE has been Germany's flagship cooperative systems activity within what is known as Middle-Germany (with some 14MEuro budget spent). Regional governments' driving rationale has been to better prepare for handling traffic-related challenges as being a main cause for facing bottlenecks in meeting ambitious German environmental and climate targets and agendas. For some mid-size towns the target is to reduce the number of days per year with critically high particulate matter levels by 5 or 10.