The transport network across Europe faces challenges relating to carbon reduction targets, energy security, and depletion of natural resources, without sacrificing its efficiency and compromising mobility. In addition, the road and rail infrastructure in particular are ageing and require renewal. Simultaneously, advances in sensors, mobile communications, smart ticketing and ‘big data’ offer the potential for customers to become an active part of the transport operations system and have the information to make decisions – for transport to enable ‘mode agnostic’ personal and business travel and – for freight operators to have more resilience and better reliability in their systems. The European transport system faces also an unavoidable societal challenge, which is achieving new levels of resource-efficiency, environmental-friendliness, safe and seamless transport for the benefit of citizens, the economy and society. In order to tackle the challenges and reap the benefits outlined above, infrastructure owners and transport operators will be required to work together, along with other crucial stakeholders, to share knowledge and cooperate in a way that will be beneficial to all parties, and this proposal seeks to facilitate this. The objective of this project is to better understand the common challenges experienced across transport modes, bring representatives of transport modes together to share experience and skills and to develop a set of common research objectives. The project will draw upon the experience gained from the Joint European Transport platform with the focus on infrastructure operations, and will also focus on research objectives presented in the Forever Open Road programme and the work of the FORx4 - Forever Open Road, Railway, Runway and River – A Cross-modal transport initiative for research for which FEHRL produced a ‘Point of View’ document.

An efficient and high-quality transport infrastructure is a fundamental requirement for the connectivity of people and goods in Europe and basis for economic growth, competitiveness and territorial cohesion. In general, the transport network in Europe is of a high standard but is still fragmented regarding the geographical distribution and the transport modes. In recent years, first networking activities and exchange of strategic programmes among the stakeholders of the four transport modes – road, rail, water and air – can be noticed but still a mono-modal, mono-disciplinary culture exists. In the light of the future challenges, e.g. increasing transport demand, ageing infrastructure, scarcity of natural resources, changing climatic conditions, it is inevitable to strengthen the collaboration of the single transport modes in order to create an improved future integrated and functioning transport system for Europe, despite of limited financial resources of the owners of the transport network. The FOX project aims to develop a highly efficient and effective cross-modal R&D environment and culture which meets the demanding requirements of the transport and connectivity. Based on already existing programmes and agendas related to the aspects of co-modal transport research, the FOX project will identify common needs and innovative techniques in the areas of construction, maintenance, inspection, and recycling & reuse of transport infrastructure. This will be reached by the involvement of all stakeholders (owners, researchers, and industry) of the four transport modes in a phased approach: Starting with the determination of the state-of-the-art in research and practice, in the next step the most promising practices and ideas will be identified. By mapping the common needs, the final aim is to establish a cross-modal Working Group to develop a roadmap for the whole transport sector and set the agenda for further improvement of cross-modal research development innovation.

The safety of powered two wheelers (PTW) plays an important role for the public authorities and the road managers. Globally speaking, since 2002, even the road safety has eventually increased but still the num of accidents involving the PTW are at high. If we look at the figures: PTW represent only 1 % of the total traffic but 28 % of the persons killed on the road. The risk of getting killed on a motorcycle is 24 times more than on a car. Since past few years, there has been a notably significant rise in the number of PTW but it is allowed a lack of data and information on PTW use and the interactions of PTW with the other road users and the road infrastructure. The state of the art conducted in 2009 showed that there is no technical solution as such that can be adapted to measure of the traffic of this specific category of vehicle (unlike the cars and the trucks) and the research development in this domain isn’t much active which is an issue of concern. The project METRAMOTO aims not only to detect and follow the PTW in the traffic to get enough measurers to be used to the relative statistics with the circulation of PTW but also to identify the trajectory of PTW to analyze their interactions with the others vehicles. These objectives deal the mobility, the road operation and the road safety. These tools will be developed around several sensors technologies used in the domain of road traffic. The work will be realized by distinguishing the ones who need intrusive intervention on the road infrastructure (hybrid sensor piezo-electric + electromagnetic loop and magnetometers) to the one non-intrusive (image analysis and laser range finder). The companies in partnership for the project will implement the results of this research works and thereof having short-term industrial solutions. With the help of road managers, we will evaluate and compare the results. The output in order to get an overview of the technology developed with respect to the objective to be attained so that one is capable of targeting the proper field of application of each of these technologies