User-friendly Information - Tool on Urban and Regional Access Regulations Schemes

The UVAR Box is a preparatory action, initiated by the European Parliament, focusing on enabling road users, in particular motorists (i.e., both professional and non-professional drivers) to be fully informed about urban and regional access schemes by working on the needed enablers, i.e., standardisation and data provision for the integration of the information in tools such as apps or navigation devices. It also includes the simplification of the generation of the necessary information to comply with the single digital gateway regulation.

The ’UVAR State of the Art Report’ of the UVAR Box project is the result of the UVAR Box partners’ investigations on existing and planned UVAR (Urban Vehicle Access Regulation) policies at the local, regional and national level, and the processes to create, define and communicate.

It provides an overview of UVARs and their processes in the EU. This overview is meant to support the structure of the UVAR data and the development of related machine-readable formats.

The final objective is to enable UVAR-responsible authorities to use the developed format to digitise their measures and make them understandable for applications and navigation software that will enhance the information of road users to ensure better respect of the UVARs.

The report is structured by:

• a short introduction to the project and methods;
• a mapping of UVAR policies;
• creation and publication processes in the five focus countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) and beyond;
• a summary of barriers and drivers for the UVAR toolbox uptake;
• conclusions for future work within and beyond the UVAR Box project.

Based on existing databases and outreach to UVAR-responsible authorities, the authors have investigated the digitisation level of existing UVAR interfaces. They have also reviewed procedures that are used to activate or deactivate UVARs, especially the dynamic ones, to define where the UVAR Box could support the processes.

The report intends to give a thorough definition of the categories of measures and the geographical scope covered in the project, and the data attributes used to define and characterise UVARs. It establishes an overview per country of the measures in force or soon to be implemented in five focus countries, but also beyond in a more summarised description. In each country’s overview, examples of practices in different localisations are also quoted.

To read the full report, download here.