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Tolling Points

International Mobility Connections: It All Comes Together at IBTTA’s Summit of Rome

By: 
Bill Cramer
Category: 
Stories

By Emanuela Stocchi

My theme for my term as IBTTA President this year has been International Mobility Connections.
Every part of my theme will be in evidence when you attend our International Summit of Rome October 15-17.

The program for the Rome Summit is deliberately international in scope. We’ll open with an in-depth look at the Italian motorway system, exploring how 27 concessionaires across a geographically diverse country work together to manage daily operations and deliver safe, effective customer service. But then, the program immediately pivots to a wide-ranging global panel, with news and insights from China, India, South Africa, Greece, Spain, and the United States. It’ll be a powerful snapshot of the wider industry, and I wasn’t surprised last week in Atlanta to talk to a number of new members and first-time attendees who are planning to come to Rome.

Welcome to My Home Town!

Of course, I take immense personal pride in seeing my professional family attend a major IBTTA event in my home town! Rome is where I received my early education and grounding, then studied political sciences before going abroad in Europe and the United States. So, if I am the woman and the professional I am today, the city that shaped me was Rome.

Helping to organize the International Summit of Rome was also a way to thank the board members and colleagues in my own organization who have been so much a part of my IBTTA journey. For years, they’ve seen me come home from IBTTA meetings with great new information and ever-increasing confidence in our industry, and they’ve heard my second-hand accounts of those events.

Now IBTTA is coming to them, so they can attend themselves and see what I’ve been talking about! I’m thrilled that my colleagues in Italy will get to meet the real people who attend the real sessions at this conference and get their own sense of how valuable it is to be a member of this incredibly vibrant international community.

Learning from Each Other

I know the benefits and takeaways from this meeting will reverberate through Italy’s tolling industry for years. It’s a chance to learn from experience around the world, and also to contribute our own insights and ideas. We’ll talk about how we operate, maintain, and improve our roads, and the program includes a technical tour to the multimedia traffic information center run by Autostrade per l’Italia. The tour will show the value of exchanging information on the nuts and bolts of what we do, enabling toll operators around the world to benchmark themselves against their colleagues and peers.

The Summit will touch on many of the big, important issues that agencies in the European Union and elsewhere have in common. We’re all dealing with the future of toll interoperability, the impacts of new roadway technologies and equipment, the rise of connected and autonomous vehicles, and the constant, fundamental importance of cyber and physical security. The pace of change keeps accelerating, and we owe it to our customers, our bondholders, and our decision-makers to keep up. Our fundamental objective is still, always, to deliver reliable, seamless mobility, and that means understanding a rapidly-shifting business environment and turning every challenge into an opportunity.

All of that begins and ends with the opportunity to connect with each other, with our industry peers, by attending the International Summit. If you come to Rome with an open mind and a passion for your industry, everything else—the ideas, the knowledge exchange, and the networking—will follow. You’ll learn a lot, grow professionally, and go home with a renewed sense of what IBTTA can contribute to you and your organization.

Register today for IBTTA’s International Summit of Rome, October 15-17, 20

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