 I'm speaking to Paul Najarian, liaison reporter from ITU's radio communications sector, Study Group 5 to the collaboration on ITS communication standards. Paul Najarian, welcome to ITU TV. Thank you for having me. First of all, let me ask you, what do we mean by intelligent transport systems or ITS? Intelligent transport systems may be defined as the convergence of information and communications technologies in everyday transportation use. Whether such use is in a roadway vehicle, public transportation, freight movement, electronic toll collection, parking management, car navigation systems, telematics information and so on. So as the information communications technologies are improving, they are becoming more and more integrated into the transportation network. As you may know, ITU has launched a campaign along with the International Automobile Federation on enhancing road safety. How can we make our roads safer? How can we concretely do this? Well, there are technologies available currently in whether embedded in a vehicle or in the roadway that could improve the safety of the roadway infrastructure and reduce the fatalities. And the numbers we're talking about are astronomical. The UN collaboration on road safety has shown that there are about 1.3 million deaths per year along the roadways worldwide. In addition, there's about 50 million injuries. And this is amounting to economic losses in excess of $500 billion worldwide. So the goal is to have at least a reduction in those numbers which can be achieved by the integration of ICTs in vehicles such as radar systems. But how can ICTs actually enhance road safety? For example, there are many information and communications technologies that could be embedded in the roadway infrastructure such as whether monitoring systems that monitor icing along the road or they could monitor whether a car is about to depart from the roadway system and so on. And which in turn they would alert either the driver or they would alert a traffic management center about these roadway conditions such as icing on the road or falling rocks, etc. So there are ICT information that could be embedded either in the roadway or in a vehicle. So do you think these technologies can also improve efficiencies in road transport and traffic management? Well, integrated traffic management systems such as Japan's Vehicle Information and Communication Systems have already been doing so since 1996. And there are these traffic management systems that control the signaling along the roadway in order to be able to put more capacity on the existing roadway infrastructure. So the goal is to maximize the capacity that the road could handle in an efficient manner. And do you foresee any smart devices coming up in the near future, things like radar collision, anti-collision devices or other systems? Yes. As part of this effort with the UN Road Collaboration, the ITU Council passed a resolution in 2010. The Council resolution was about ICTs and improving road safety. As a result of this ITU Council resolution, a World Radio Communication conference was added during WRC 2012 on harmonizing spectrum for collision avoidance radar in the 79 GHz, which is known as Agenda Item 1.18 on the World Radio Communication Conference for 2015. So if we were able to harmonize at least spectrum globally for all car manufacturers and vehicle manufacturers and roadway infrastructure in this band, we would be able to vacate some of the other technologies that are available in other spectrum and harmonize them at 79 GHz in order to have economies of scale for the car manufacturers and the automobile industry. So do you foresee then that these technologies will become more ubiquitous, will be used more widely? Yes. With this harmonization and these economies of scale, we actually foresee this technology becoming more available in not just at the high end level of classes, but also at the lower end level of vehicles, as well as motorcycles as well. Because we are talking about not just collision avoidance of the driver and the passengers of the vehicle, but we're also talking about collision avoidance with pedestrians. So this is a technology for intersection collision avoidance, especially with pedestrians. So what do you think would be the next steps then, looking into the future, looking at road safety as a holistic area of management and in ITS and intelligent transport systems? Well, what we see, first of all, is an integration of an ITS telecommunications architecture as part of the deployment of intelligent transportation systems worldwide. So once that telecommunications policy is agreed upon, then we could start harmonize different types of application in specific services. For example, we could harmonize the collision avoidance radar in the radio location service. We could harmonize applications such as dedicated short-range communications in the land mobile service in the 5.8 or 5.9 GHz. So that is what is foreseen in the future, is that rather than having a mosaic type of an approach in terms of the ITS deployment worldwide, in order to have the smaller pockets where the ITS spectrum requirements could be defined. So you think you'll have a safer world on the roads in the near future? Absolutely. I mean, even with some of the technologies that are available now, the workshop in today's workshop with the UN ECE has already demonstrated some improvements over the last, in this past decade. And we hope to have much, much better numbers by 2020. Well, Hungarian, thank you very much. Thank you.