A word from our Chairman!

Saturday 17 December 2011 > 00:14

Dear EasyWay Friends,

Time flies when you are having fun! So you can imagine how fast this EasyWay Chairmanship year 2011 went bye for me because it was really so much fun. To chair the EW SC meetings, to participate in many other EW meetings, to work with the stakeholders, to represent EasyWay at many congresses etc. etc. It seems like yesterday when I think back one year. Fred Zijderhand and myself were looking ahead at our Chairmanship 2011 and we decided to put our ideas on one sheet because we were (and are) both convinced that focus is very important when you would like to go forward. And forward was and is the direction that we had and have in mind for EasyWay. Because we honestly believe that when it comes to harmonised deployment of ITS services in Europe there is only one programme and organizational structure capable of playing a decisive role: EasyWay.

You can see the list we have used all year long here below.

1.  Long-term strategy
   
   • Vision, roadmap, workplans
   • EasyWay 3,4,5 and EasyWay as structural ITS leader in Europe

2. Evaluation and monitoring
   
   • Realize what we have promised in Strategy and Actionplan, workplans and EW2 Decision
   • Deployment guidelines and Deployment maps

3. Communication and marketing
   
   • Internet website and modern communication techniques
   • Annual Forum

4. Cooperation with external stakeholders
   
   • At a European level with Ertico, CEDR, ASECAP, Drive C2X/Car2Car, IRF, TISA etc: concrete goals, win-win
   • At region, national and project level

5. Corridormanagement
   
   • “Multimodal Deployment Corridors”
   • Work together as memberstates and as euro regions

6. eCall and cooperative systems
   
   • Role for EasyWay?
   • Worldwide cooperation with US, China and Japan?

7. Supervisory Programme Board

Now looking back after a year of hard work I can only be happy about the results. First of all we have sticked to this sheet and we have focused on those topics all year long and made clear progress for every topic.

I think it is very important to work with a plan like this that gives you focus and clear goals to work on. Because large scale harmonised deployment of ITS services takes time and takes consistency. And therefore I think we also have to stick to (more or less) those topics next year and the years to come. And in my opinion this is very well possible. Because on one hand the topics are important to finish EasyWay 2 well and realize what we have promised.  And on the other hand because the topics are  important for the future. Like for example the corridor approach.

And talking about the future, first of all let me thank you all for your hard work, for your support and also for the interesting discussions we had on different levels and about different topics. And also let me tell you that you can count on me next year when I will try to support our new chairman Andreas Arnaouits the same way that he has supported me this year. And support is in my view one of the biggest assets of EasyWay: if we can make sure that we will keep supporting each other in an active way we can be assured that we can not only realize our EasyWay 2 promises but also create a bright future for EasyWay in Europe. Wishing you all very pleasant and happy Christmas-days and a very bright and healthy 2012.

See you all next year,

Ronald.