A lively debate between several individuals with different experiences: this was the goal of A4 Holding which, through its subsidiary A4 Trading, a company managing infrastructure and motorway mobility services in the north east of Italy, has organised precisely that. The event will involve the company’s top management figures actively discussing with other leading professionals who play a key role in Brescia’s motorway safety: Francesco Bettoni - Chairman of BreBeMi Spa, Carlo Caromani - Captain of Brescia Provincial Police, Girolamo Lacquaniti - Captain of Verona Traffic Police and Angelo Centola - General Manager of ACI in Brescia
The Brescia Est Parking Facility, conceived, designed, built and managed by the A4 Holding Group, combines a range of services, from catering to hospitality, with a main focus on hauliers and their vehicles. This is the basis for the event “Safety Ecosystem: designing, developing and implementing road safety”, to be held on Saturday 16th September 2017, from 11am, as part of the European Truck Festival. This event will compare different approaches to the pressing problem of road traffic safety: from institutional to technical issues, from urban to motorway mobility.
Two A4 Holding Group companies will be taking part in the event (A4 Mobility, the Group’s centre of technological expertise, and A4 Brescia Padova, the concessionary managing the stretch of motorway of the same name), the purpose of which is to highlight and confirm the measures being taken to implement advanced technology in order to improve road safety, at a time when vehicles are becoming increasingly connected to the infrastructure they're travelling on. Good examples of this are the new floating car data services (a method to determine the traffic flow on a given road network by collecting geolocation data such as speed, direction of travel, and time information from mobile phones), and Waze, the mobile navigation app which is also a social network and an extremely effective tool for “beating traffic”.
With an average of over 280,000 vehicles travelling on the motorway every day (65,400 of which are heavy goods vehicles), amounting to almost 103 million vehicles travelling on our motorway network in 2016, it is clear to see why safety has always been a top priority for A4 Holding.
In fact, the company invests over Euro 40 million each year on maintaining, repairing and improving its roads, including the work needed to adapt the stretches of motorway under management, making them more efficient: from surfacing to signs, from lighting in key areas to the careful cutting of grass verges, right through to installing and maintaining fences, overpass protection and safety barriers along the A4 Brescia-Padua and the A31 Valdastico.
“All players in this industry are required to increasingly support and strengthen safety procedures for travellers”, commented the General Manager of A4 Holding Maurizio Pagani, “in particular, our Group has decided to implement a specific action plan dedicated to this issue. Our investment and intervention policy based on advanced technology has allowed us to keep the rate of accidents on our network well below the European average. In 2016, 16.80 accidents were recorded for every 100 million vehicles/kilometre: over the last 10 years, the overall accident rate on our stretch of motorway has halved. Of course, we're not going to stop at this milestone, especially not when considering the new mobile technologies that are already allowing us to imagine and design ongoing innovation to foster and protect the safety of travellers: this is precisely what we’re doing and experimenting with on the Brescia-Padua motorway, dedicating specific investments and company resources to designing and developing expertise and avant-garde processes, with the aim of further strengthening the combination of technology and safety”.
