ITS World, the Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress, is the world’s largest single event in the intelligent traffic sector. It brings together world leaders, professionals, policymakers, researchers and private-sector representatives. This year’s ITS World Congress was held in Los Angeles, USA on 18–23 September 2022, and its theme was “Transformation by Transportation”.

The rapid growth in road traffic levelled off during the early summer. On the railways, the number of freight trains has decreased considerably on the previous year. Even though air traffic picked up during the early summer, traffic volumes are still clearly lower than before the pandemic. All these insights were gleaned from Traffic Management Company Fintraffic’s April–June statistics.

Improvement of traffic services for businesses and households received a boost with the adoption of an open-source Rulebook by operators in the sector. The goal here is to promote service development in the industry, in both goods and passenger traffic, with means such as data sharing. The traffic sector is thus at last following the lead of the banking and telecommunications sectors, which have for a long time now had interoperable customer services in place.

The pandemic, which has now entered its third year, continues to impact various modes of transport. Road traffic volumes in January–March rose on the previous year, but remained slightly lower than in the pre-pandemic era. The knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine were most evident in train and air traffic. Use of the traffic data produced by Fintraffic, which is shared for use in applications such as navigators, reached a new record-breaking high. All these insights were gleaned from statistics published by Fintraffic in January–March.