15 September 2026 | New Delhi, India – IRF Director General Gonzalo Alcaraz is participating in the FIDIC Global Infrastructure Conference 2026 in New Delhi, India, where he is speaking during the FIDIC Parallel Session, “Sustainable Transport for People and Prosperity”.

Held from 13–15 September, FIDIC’s flagship annual conference brings together governments, policymakers, clients, consulting engineers, contractors, financiers and other infrastructure professionals from across the world to exchange knowledge, share experience and strengthen collaboration.

Against this backdrop, Alcaraz is highlighting a fundamental question for the road sector: how should we measure the success of transport infrastructure?

Rather than focusing solely on kilometres constructed, road condition or vehicle throughput, Alcaraz argues that transport infrastructure must also be assessed by the people it connects, the opportunities it enables, the lives it protects and the long-term value it delivers.

Putting people at the centre of connectivity

With the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Transport 2026–2035 now underway, roads have a central role to play in making mobility safer, cleaner and more inclusive.

From IRF’s perspective, a road ultimately serves a purpose beyond its physical infrastructure. It should connect people to jobs, markets, schools and healthcare, reliably at reasonable cost.

This requires road agencies to identify where connectivity gaps exist and direct investment towards the communities that need it most. Accessibility mapping, targeted improvements to maintain year-round passability and social-equity considerations in project prioritisation can help ensure that investment responds to people’s needs rather than traffic volumes alone.

Safety must be considered alongside connectivity. Roads that expand access without providing safe conditions for pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users can simply transfer risk to the communities they are intended to serve.

Building the capacity to deliver safer roads

In addressing what is needed to close connectivity and safety gaps, DG Alcaraz points to professional and institutional capacity as a critical link between standards, funding and political commitment.

Governments may have the necessary policies and financing, but without qualified professionals and institutions capable of applying them, those measures may not translate into safer outcomes.

IRF is working to address this implementation gap through initiatives including the IRF International Registry for Road Safety Auditors, established in 2024 and now covering more than 350 professionals worldwide. The registry provides road authorities, project owners and development banks with a transparent means of identifying auditors whose qualifications and experience have been verified.

The IRF Ten-Step Plan for Safer Road Infrastructure provides another practical framework, linking national gap analysis, design standards, workforce development, assessment programmes, road safety audits and ongoing monitoring. The approach is currently being applied in Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal, while national design guidance is being adopted in the Kyrgyz Republic.

For DG Alcaraz, strengthening this capacity offers a way to advance both safety and connectivity: countries can expand their networks while building the expertise needed to ensure that new and existing infrastructure serves people safely.

Making better decisions through better data

During his intervention, DG Alcaraz identified data and monitoring as a practice that should be mainstreamed across the transport sector.

Reliable, comparable data provides the foundation for investment decisions, budget allocation and safety programmes. Yet in many countries, transport data remains incomplete, outdated or difficult to compare across jurisdictions.

IRF’s World Road Statistics contributes to addressing this challenge. The resource brings together more than 200 indicators across eleven themes from more than 200 countries and territories, drawing on data from primary sources including ministries, road authorities and national statistical offices. Its road safety data and dashboards also enable countries to benchmark casualty trends and monitor progress over time.

As the sector moves towards more people-centred measures of transport performance, data will need to capture not only the size and use of road networks, but also how effectively those networks provide access and protect their users.

Treating capacity as core infrastructure

Looking ahead, DG Alcaraz calls for governments to give capacity building a more prominent place in transport programmes and funding.

The need extends across four practical areas, specifically data and asset management, people-centred planning, procurement and contract management and institutional governance. Strengthening these capabilities can help road agencies and professionals translate standards and investment into better delivery.

DG Alcaraz also emphasised the role of consulting engineers in bringing this capacity into projects and helping scale safer and more inclusive infrastructure.

His message is straightforward: capacity should be funded as deliberately as physical infrastructure.

Europe is preparing for the next generation of large-scale demonstrations of Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM). That is both necessary and timely. After years of successful research, the challenge is no longer simply to put more automated vehicles on European roads, but to demonstrate how automated mobility can work safely and reliably across the diverse road environments in which those vehicles will actually operate.

But as we move from research projects to demonstrations at scale, there is a risk that we ask the wrong question.

The challenge is not simply how to put more automated vehicles on European roads. It is how to make automated mobility work safely, reliably and economically across the extraordinarily diverse road environments in which those vehicles will actually operate.

For much of the past decade, the debate around automated driving has periodically been reduced to a choice between two competing visions: increasingly capable vehicles able to understand virtually any environment through onboard technology, or increasingly sophisticated infrastructure supporting those vehicles from the roadside.

Experience suggests that this is a false choice.

Recent European pilots have conclusively demonstrated that infrastructure-based sensing can improve detection where vehicle perception encounters predictable limitations: an obscured vulnerable road user, a merging vehicle beyond the immediate field of view, workers inside a temporary work zone or an approaching emergency vehicle.

Combining infrastructure and onboard perception can allow an automated vehicle to anticipate an event earlier. Reliable digital information can warn vehicles about hazards they cannot yet see. Infrastructure-supported positioning can provide resilience where GNSS performance deteriorates. Accurate information about temporary road configurations can prevent the physical and digital road from telling the vehicle two different stories.

Europe has 27 Member States, hundreds of road authorities and operators, widely differing investment cycles and enormous variation in the quality and digital maturity of its networks. The automotive technology cycle inevitably moves faster.

But this does not mean that infrastructure choices can be deferred until automated vehicles are ready.

Nor does it mean that Europe needs to equip every kilometre of road with expensive roadside technology. A much more pragmatic pathway is available to us.

Europe’s automotive industry faces formidable global competition. Supporting innovation in automated driving, AI and vehicle technology is therefore an entirely legitimate strategic priority. But competitiveness cannot be measured only by the sophistication of the vehicle. It must eventually be measured by our ability to deploy the technology.

A vehicle capable of highly automated operation under carefully defined conditions is one achievement. A mobility system capable of supporting that vehicle reliably across cities, motorways, temporary work zones, different road operators and national borders is another.

Europe needs both.

Previous CCAM programmes have already shown that moving from successful pilots to scalable deployment depends on interoperability, common operational procedures, predictable digital information and coordination across infrastructure and vehicle systems.

A large-scale demonstration that primarily scales the number of vehicles without simultaneously testing the conditions necessary for their deployment risks answering yesterday’s question at tomorrow’s scale.

The next phase of European CCAM research represents an opportunity to move beyond proving individual technologies towards demonstrating a deployable European mobility system.

Doing so does not require delaying automotive innovation while Europe waits for its infrastructure to catch up. It requires recognising that vehicle readiness and infrastructure readiness are interdependent and developing them accordingly.

Our projects have given us increasingly sophisticated tools to classify infrastructure support, assess road readiness, understand Operational Design Domains and prioritise investment. They have also demonstrated infrastructure-supported functions under real-world conditions.

The logical next step is to test those relationships at scale, alongside the vehicles they are intended to support.

Europe should certainly continue investing in better automated vehicles.  But if our objective is large-scale automated mobility, we also need to understand the roads on which they will drive.

That is what the next generation of CCAM demonstrations should demonstrate.