Bidisha Ghosh explores transport 5.0

Bringing Transport 5.0 to Ireland

Bidisha Ghosh, Associate Professor of Civil Structuring and Environmental

Engineering at Trinity College Dublin and chair of the Irish Transport Research

Network, speaks to eolas about Transport 5.0 and how it will help Ireland and Europe move towards sustainable, human-centric modes of transport.

“Transport 5.0 is a term for the bringing together of Industry 5.0 and Society 5.0. Industry 5.0 is the future, where we will be going very soon,” Ghosh explains. “Industry 5.0 will contain mass customisation and cyber physical cognitive systems. The word cognitive is quite important here, it brings us to the realm of AI and how it will interact with cyber and physical space and how we can give better benefits to society through customisation. When we go to Industry 5.0 – augmented reality, big data etcetera – we need to think about horizontal and vertical system integration, which we haven’t achieved to the extent we would like.”

The change to Transport 5.0 is coming fast, Ghosh says, with Europe moving towards a “sustainable, human-centric industry”. To this end, the European Commission has published its AI White Paper, as an information guide on how AI should be utilised, and its European Skills Agenda, which says that European workers should be reskilled or upskilled to allow them to play a role in this digitalisation agenda and benefit from it.

The key to the successful implementation of Transport 5.0 is the consideration of societal transformation as well as technological. “Society 5.0 is a human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems via a system that highly integrates cyber and physical space,” Ghosh says. “We are now in Society 4.0, the society of information where we share information and take information. The idea is that we should have comfortable, high quality lives that are full of vitality. The technology should work for human good. Germany has already started work on this. It has a project called Transport 5.0, where it is defining what it believes Transport 5.0 is: crossdomain, self-organising transport schemes and organisational principles for a user-centred transport system.”

In Transport 4.0 we currently use sensors that convert energy from changes in temperature, pressure, magnetism, etcetera into data; Transport 5.0 means that we “will be converting minds to data, people’s intentions, poses and movements” will create information. Actuators will control physical devices – automatic cars or traffic lights for example – where data is processed and converted to control command of the machines to control the movement or actions of those machines. “In case of social prescription, what will happen is that data will be converted to mind, so people will be acting towards greater social good, taking routes that reduce congestion, travelling at speeds for the benefit of the entire traffic stream,” Ghosh says.

Smart mobility test beds exist throughout the world, and Ghosh points to notable examples in Qingdao, Chelyabinsk, Western Australia and London. For Ireland, she concludes, this is the next step: “In Ireland at present, we have smart cities, smart districts and Smart Dublin. The pathway from going from a smart city to a smart mobility zone is a goal around which we need to develop a manual to make this jump. One of the first steps is looking into the infrastructural needs, the sensors, the communications and whatever else we need.

“We need to figure out how the infrastructure will communicate with the cars, and we need to think about international and European collaboration. There is so much going on and one of the easiest ways to participate is through European projects. We are looking into how we can bring cooperative, conceive and automated mobility into Ireland and move Ireland from Transport 4.0 to Transport 5.0. This is the future; it is coming very fast and there is no way to avoid it.”

Ireland oversees global pledge to build back better in transport

Credit: Kelly Sikkema

Ireland’s year holding the Presidency of the International Transport Forum (ITF) culminated in a commitment to raise ambition and invest in the transition to green mobility by transport ministers across the globe.

In May 2021, the transport ministers of 63 countries of the ITF at the OECD agreed to use the recovery from the pandemic to transform their transport sectors.

Originally scheduled to take place in May 2020 in Leipzig, Germany, the annual ITF summit was postponed due to the pandemic and was instead held virtually between 17 and 28 May 2021 and opened by Transport Minister Eamon Ryan TD.

Ireland’s presidency of the ITF, which was taken up in 2019, was extended by a year because of the pandemic and, as expected, pandemic recovery dominated the rescheduled virtual event.

Ryan chaired the Annual Council of Ministers of Transport on 27 May, following which, an unanimously agreed ministerial declaration was released, reading: “Ministers note that the recovery from this pandemic offers new opportunities to reshape transport systems and shift to more resilient, efficient, sustainable and equitable mobility.

“In order to embrace the opportunity to build back better, ministers commit to show ambition, leadership and continued investment in the transition to greener and more efficient transport solutions.”

The ITF is an intergovernmental organisation, acting as a think tank for transport policy and organising the annual summit for transport ministers.

The Presidency of the ITF revolves annually, and Ireland previously held the role of President of the organisations predecessor, the Conference of Minister of Transport (ECMT).

The annual summit took place in the context of findings that transport activity is set to double by 2050

The ITF’s transport outlook for 2021, factoring in a slowing of overall demand growth because of the economic impact of the pandemic and fresh decarbonisation commitments, points to a 16 per cent increase in CO2 emissions from transport by 2050 even if current commitments are fully implemented.

“Current transport decarbonisation policies are insufficient to pivot passenger and freight transport onto a sustainable path,” the report states, highlighting that more ambitious decarbonisation policies could reduce CO2 emissions by 70 per cent, in line with the goal of the Paris Agreement ambition to limit global warning to 1.5oC.

The ITF’s founding, which made the ECMT a worldwide organisation by making full-time members of previous associate members such as Japan and the United States, was done through the 2006 Declaration on the Development of the ECMT, colloquially known as the Dublin Declaration. Among a range of commitments undertaken by ministers at the annual summit were:

• promoting of urban mobility redesigns that build on the boom for walking and cycling during the pandemic;

• ensuring that new technologies and innovative mobility options foster equitable access for all citizens;

• promoting of education and training and a more inclusive and fair workplace for all transport workers;

• encouraging the use of public transport;

• fostering automation, digitalisation and data innovation;

• promoting of innovation in electrification, low- and zero-carbon fuels, hydrogen fuel cells and newgeneration batteries; and

• promoting of intermodal transport and develop interoperability.

Commenting following the ITF summit, Ryan said: “In the context of climate change and the urgent need to fundamentally reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, coupled with digitalisation, automation and the impact of Covid-19, our transport systems are at a turning point.

“As we look to shift towards cleaner and efficient transport networks, we must innovate and drive behaviour change to ensure passengers and freight stay connected, in a sustainable manner, to the communities and businesses which need them.

The ITF Summit has provided a muchneeded opportunity for transport leaders from around the world to join together and plan the pathway towards realising that vision.”

The ITF 2022 Summit is scheduled to return to Leipzig next year and will be under the Presidency of Morocco before passing to the UK in 2023.