 Now last year I had some messages and just as a refreshment I believe they are still valid but I don't want to fully repeat them. One, as Mr. Frisbark mentioned, we are the centre of the UN Transport Conventions and you can see on this map that countries that are in dark green are the ones who exceeded most of these conventions and countries in white have not exceeded to one single UN Convention on Transport and light green means that not that many. So there is still a long way to go. Now in the vehicle regulations area I would say that the situation is not that bad except for the periodical vehicle inspections. However, you can consider the accession to the UN Conventions as an indicator of governance and capacity to make your economy competitive in the world. We compare the accession intensity of high income countries who are landlocked like Switzerland or Austria and low income countries who are landlocked like for example Tajikistan but I can name others as well. Now the accession intensity to the UN Conventions of the high income countries landlocked is 86%. The landlocked low income countries 12%. So there is definitely a correlation even between economic competitiveness and implementation and accession to the UN Conventions. The main message last year was and this is the main message this year as well that the convergence of technologies and actually as a result of that the traditional transport sector and the traditional telecommunications sector this convergence is actually calling for changing role of governments but this changing role is pushed into different directions as well by other changes the political power shift in the world and also the increasing concern at the multilateral level on the performance of the transport sector. So definitely there is a growing need for the use of multilateralism like for example WP 29. Now since last year there are some achievements on the ground supporting automation in the road sector but not only the road sector I would like to underline that from my perspective working on England transport we don't like saying that road, road, road because the road sector is effective if it is well connected to the other modes and if the other modes are well used as well. So we had a couple of achievements. One achievement I would say is that for the first time in the history the importance of connectivity for economic growth, social integration and peace has been recognized by the General Assembly by a resolution and when we speak about connectivity of course traditionally we say connecting by roads and railroads to different countries and having an access to a port but connectivity also means the network connected cars. So connectivity is more than the physical what we can see it is also the IT connectivity so it's a very important thing that for the first time there is a political recognition of this important area. Another achievement since we met last year is the amendment proposal of the Vienna Conventions because as you all know there are lots of concerns or complaints that what is a real problem is the Vienna Conventions because the driver must be in control of the vehicle and its animals if it's not a motorized vehicle. So well I challenge that this is a real concern but it has been blown out of proportions so much that politically there was a need to make a change. So now the governments agreed on the amendments in the framework of the Working Party on Road Safety this is the WP1 and the agreement is not only Vienna Conventions it has all the conventions on traffic rules of 1949 which are the Geneva Conventions and their amendment protocols. So the main message there is that if the technology is sort of adopted by WP29 regulation then it is in line with the principles of the Geneva and Vienna Conventions. So if you work well with the vehicle regulations you will not have a problem with the interpretation of the Vienna Convention in a simple term. However if you are not a contracting party to any of the vehicle regulation conventions then at least you have to have the possibility that in the car the automation can be switched off because in that case again you don't have a conflict, a legal conflict. Well as you know this is the first step so this is not the end. The Working Party recognized that with this they practically addressed the political concern but much more work needs to be done to understand the different levels of automation and what changes are needed on that and I will speak a little bit later on that as well. Then a number of U.S. regulations on vehicle automation have been passed during the past year as well plus the Island Transport Committee not only had its policy debate last year on innovations with a lot of inputs on automated driving as well as Google was one of our speakers this year actually the committee decided to ask more work on ITS not simply in the vehicle area in the traffic rules area in the infrastructure area which are in different working parties but in a horizontal way so much more cooperation between the different working parties is envisaged and maybe next year there will be a bigger decision on support of the use of information and communication technologies and intelligent transport services and last but not least the ITS Informer Working Group under WP-29 has agreed on a new roadmap and now they are even changed their names because automated driving is included in their area so this is the last year only the tip of the iceberg but we have still a lot of areas to look into and when I mentioned the liability I'm serious about that we cannot drop the ball after having the first little progress we will have to understand much much better the different levels of automation and their impact on safety and traffic rules and so I would like to see who is representing the customers because the human beings, the individuals are not very well represented so far we understand the demand from different other stakeholders but the customers' interests are not that included then infrastructure the different speed and different life cycles would call for a very different approach in investment planning a lot of road investment planning is underway right now but maybe there should be even a stage construction approach for the IT connections and it is not yet in the policymakers' mind when we speak about infrastructure I would like to consider that traffic management is part of that and traffic management is in revolution but aren't the directions diverging and if they are diverging how to make sure that they will be harmonized because you cannot go in one direction for traffic management in cities in another city in another direction and for the intercity transport again another one traffic rules perhaps the most difficult ones the total overhaul is needed just think of platooning in traffic rules we have the rule of having a mandatory distance between the vehicles so in order to allow that if somebody takes over that car has the possibility to come back but in platooning would that be feasible and of course the traffic rules are not good if they are on a piecemeal way or at a national level or even regional they must be at multilateral level new mobility we all speak about this convergence of ICT and transport at a time when new mobility patterns are coming up more priority to public transport there are already experiments on automation for public transport buses but how much more you can go and how much the impact on car use will have car share definitely changes this and road transport is not alone it is part of the integrated network so multimodal transport is important recently we have seen a new Australian research about increasing safety at level crossing through information technologies now maybe much more can be done in that area but I know it's costly however the benefits would be very high impacts the impacts are not well understood yet there are lots of promises hopefully we have to have the understanding sooner or later how these promises or impact assessment can be carried out but so we have to understand the impacts on jobs the social impact the impact of the societal impact the change of lifestyle and the change in mobility and also think of the digital divide among countries do we want to see that some vehicles will not be able to enter less developed countries because their infrastructure is not ready to handle those vehicles or are they really safer under different conditions and regulations we have heard that there are different standard setting activities in ITU we know that very important activities we know that there are we don't call them standards we have regulations we set the regulations but with this convergence we have to start thinking about making sure that there is this one stop shop approach one stop shop so that regulations are not going to be discussed and agreed on separately and then long process to harmonize them by the way we have experience of that bad practice in several areas instead of that it's better to have one already harmonized compromise solution so many multilateral regulators might have a problem with this and we have to make sure that the multilateral stakeholders are around the same table so that we can service the people first of all but also the growth of the industries in the most efficient way so these are the challenges there are much more but these are the challenges we are looking at in this year and with that I have reached my area of conclusions that there is a long way to convert all these challenges into opportunities the Inland Transport Committee is determined to continue to be a platform even more for consultations and to turn the results into legislative decisions and you are more welcome most welcome to join forces with us thank you