Following our appointment as Technical Secretariat for the Second European ITS Conference to be held in Bilbao in June 2001 as a joint venture between ERTICO and Bizkaia Provincial Government, we promoted several ITS projects to be showcased during that event, since its ultimate goal was to empower the local industry in this (then) emerging field.

So in parallel to the lobbying efforts to confirm Bilbao's appointment as the venue to host such an event, we engaged several institutions and local firms to develop and deploy new ITS traffic, transit and parking initiatives

As examples we can mention:

• An innovative SMS service to inform motorists of any traffic incidents in the Bilbao Metropolitan road network, including SMS when any such incident was solved
• A new on street parking based on car plates recognition, composed of new parkmeters arranged into a computer network, which made nearly impossible meter feeding, thus allowing a non linear parking fee to encourage shopping trips while discouraging commuter trips
• New on street panels with real time information on bus arrivals to improve users perceptions

Given the smarthphones we enjoy today, we may have difficulty remembering our cellular phones of that era (when WAP was the killer application) in order to understand the pioneering character of such projects.

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