The Digital Transport Days Declaration is the outcome of the 3-day conference organised by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), and the Estonian Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
The conference was held on 8-10 November 2017 in Tallinn, Estonia, a country known as the most advanced digital society in the world.
The event gathered about 300 representatives of public and private partners from all transport sectors and high-level speakers such as Violeta Bulc, European Commissioner for Transport, and Kadri Simson, Estonian Minister for Economic Affairs and Infrastructure.
The conference aimed to explore the potential and address the challenges of digitalisation of transport and mobility both for passengers and freight. Transport needs to be and remains a key political priority for the EC and digitalisation is fundamentally changing the transport sector. New digital technologies will help to respond to the pressing need to make transport safer, more efficient and sustainable. Data is the new fuel for transport and provides numerous opportunities for organising transport and mobility services in a new and innovative way, such as autonomous trucks, increased capacity of the existing infrastructure, multimodal integration, etc. At the same time, the obstacles that may hinder the full potential of what digitalisation can offer need to be identified and tackled. Cybersecurity is for example an important issue and the changing nature of jobs in transport.
In the Declaration, stakeholders state that European leadership in digitalisation – making our transport system more efficient, safe, inclusive, sustainable and multimodal – must be a dream turned into reality. For digitalisation to work, we must always remember that it’s still about people. Trust is essential for data access, sharing and re-use a digitalised transport world. Creative and concrete new measures will be needed to ensure a socially sustainable transition to digitalised and automated transport. Investing in skills and in life-long learning is also an investment in digitalisation.
The full Declaration is available here.