Press Releases

Dear,

Professor Gouliamos, Ms Panayiotou, distinguished speakers and quests,

I would like to thank you for inviting me to attend this event, organised by the Cyprus Organisation for Standardization.

Intelligent Transport Systems have been widely deployed in many countries around the world since the 1960's.  Since then, there have been impressive strides made in this area, both in terms of cutting edge technological advances but also through the achievements made in the telecommunications sector.  The need to deploy large scale intelligent and interoperable technologies such as Intelligent Transport Systems in order to optimise the capacity and use of infrastructure is clearly stated in the EU Transport White Paper.

Cyprus endeavours to achieve a modern and well developed transport and telecommunications infrastructure, which is vital for the growth of the Cyprus economy and its competitiveness by promoting the development of public open data policies and by addressing multimodality through the effective development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS).

Cyprus, relative to other EU States, is at the early stages of ITS deployment.  A few systems are running successfully, while Cyprus is already planning a full-scale deployment of a series of ITS applications for the years to come in order to achieve improvements in mobility, safety, productivity of its transportation system and mitigation of the environmental effects.

We expect to achieve a better integration of all transport modes in order to cover all interfaces and deploy several applications that will assist towards a modal shift to public transport, an area where Cyprus is behind compared to most of European Member States. Since the completion of an ITS Master Plan for Cyprus in 2009, partially funded by the Transition Facility, we embarked on implementing several systems in order to provide public transport information and planning as well as real time traffic information, to name a few.

Finally, the development of an appropriate business model to bring together all actors and stakeholders in Cyprus, namely a Cyprus ITS Platform, is also something we are looking into in order to boost the deployment of ITS in Cyprus and ensure co-ordination between the relevant stakeholders.

I would like to wish you a successful and productive day at this Conference.