ITS and Decarbonisation: MATIS’s Contribution to Greener Road Networks

Reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 also means squeezing the emissions out of the infrastructure we already have. Congestion itself is a carbon problem: a vehicle stuck in stop-and-go traffic burns far more fuel per kilometre than one moving at a steady pace. This is the specific problem the MATIS consortium’s ITS deployments are built to attack. Across MATIS 1 alone, the programme targets a 3% reduction in CO₂ emissions at major bottlenecks — a modest-sounding percentage that, multiplied across an entire TEN-T corridor, represents a substantial volume of avoided emissions.

Smoothing the flow to avoid stop-and-go emissions

The clearest emissions lever is preventing traffic from bunching up in the first place. On the Rennes ring road, DIRO’s ramp-metering system holds vehicles at the access slip roads for up to a minute, so the ring road itself never tips into gridlock. Each vehicle that doesn’t sit in a queue is a vehicle that isn’t idling and re-accelerating; the first deployment already delivered significant queuing time avoided per day across morning and evening peaks, a direct proxy for fuel and emissions saved, with four further access points now feeding into the same logic.

A share of a motorway’s emissions also comes from the jams that build up behind an accident or a false alert. This is where MATIS’s incident-detection work has a direct decarbonisation payoff. On Catalonia’s C-32, AUCAT’s tunnel-management upgrade goes further, cutting incident-related queues by more than 50% and freeing over 10,000 vehicle-hours a year that would otherwise have been spent stationary rather than moving.

The energy backbone behind a lower-carbon road

Decarbonising the network also depends on infrastructure most drivers never see. On the A4 Brescia–Verona–Vicenza–Padova corridor, a new SCADA system gives operators real-time remote monitoring of the power supply feeding tunnels and roadside equipment, catching faults before they cause an outage that would otherwise disrupt traffic flow — and with it, generate the very stop-and-go emissions the rest of MATIS is designed to eliminate.

Taken together, these projects make the same point from different angles: cutting road transport emissions is not only a question of which vehicles are on the road, but of how well the road itself manages the flow, the incidents and the conditions that push a smooth journey into a stationary, fuel-burning one.

 

MATIS Steering Committee in Barcelona

The MATIS project held its Steering Committee meeting on June 10 and 11 at the Servei Català de Trànsit headquarters in Barcelona. This gathering marked an important halfway milestone, providing partners with the opportunity to align on project progress, technical implementation, and future objectives.

During these two days, participants engaged in technical presentations, discussed the ongoing work packages, and visited the regional traffic control centre, gaining valuable insights into local traffic operations and MATIS activities on Spanish territory.

This edition of the Steering Committee also featured MATIS’ first workshop on evaluation, bringing together key partners from the wider ITS community, including X4ITS, MERIDIAN EU Corridor, SCALE, and C-ROADS. This collaborative workshop facilitated an exchange of best practices and expertise in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and Cooperative ITS (C-ITS) deployment and assessment.

We would like to warmly thank Ignacio Sánchez Reig and the Servei Català de Trànsit for their excellent organisation and hospitality, enhanced by the memorable view of the Sagrada Família.