|
Accessing Transportation Information Resources
Worldwide
St. Petersburg, Florida
Sunday, July 29, 2001 - 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Finnish Road Administration
Sirpa Haapamaki,
Finnish Road Administration
Those of you who have followed closely, may notice that the name
of our institution changed in the beginning of this year. The Finnish
National Road Administration was dismantled and the institution
under this name ceased existing .
In spring 2000 the Finnish Government made a decision-in-principle
to divide the state agency called Finnish National Road Administration
into state agency called Finnish Road Administration, still using
the abbreviation Finnra, and the state-owned enterprise called Finnish
Road Enterprise. The parliament passed the relevant laws and at
the beginning of this year, two completely different organizations
following the agency's footsteps started operating.
Before the division, our organization had been working under different
names and in several fields during its existence that spans two
centuries. However, the new reform was very drastic.
The present state agency Finnish Road Administration (Finnra) is
in charge of public roads, including the local roads or county roads,
and it commissions road product services from service providers.
The Finnish Road Enterprise, on the other hand, works in construction
and maintenance. It is a state owned company with business principles.
Unlike its predecessor, the Road Enterprise operates in open competition
with other contractors.
The reform has been difficult within the both institutions. Besides
introducing competition in a controlled way, another priority has
been to safeguard the position of the staff in the best possible
way.
The new model is supposed to be feasible. It should increase the
productivity of road
appropriations without compromising state control over the assets.
Finnra Services
After the division Finnra has a staff of one thousand employees
all over the country. The institution consists of central administration
and nine road regions. Central administration is divided into twelve
units each of them having their own area of responsibility including
development, consultation, expert, information and support services.
The road regions are in charge of public and local roads management
in their areas.
The regions have the necessary resources to carry out basic duties
and they have service points to perform a variety of duties in their
areas.
The network of public roads in our country is very comprehensive
and gives a good regional coverage. However, the changes in the
social structure and international transport mean new challenges
for the improvement of the road network.
Among the goals set by Ministry of Transport the number one objective
is traffic safety. The Road Administration will revise speed limits
in build-up areas and invest in safety with collaboration with municipalities.
Through road management actions, serious traffic accidents can be
reduced.
So far Finnra has taken great efforts to reduce accidents and despite
very extreme weather conditions during autumn, winter and spring,
Finland has one of the lowest accident rates among the European
countries.
Perhaps you don't know that in the northernmost Finland there are
five seasons instead of four: they are spring, summer, autumn, darkness
and winter.
Flow of traffic is the second goal. Finnra will improve conditions
in pedestrian and bicycle traffic and construct new bicycle lanes,
as well as promote the public transportation facilities.
As for the third goal, environment: Finnra will implement groundwater
protection, reduce traffic noise affecting residents, as well as
reduce the amount of de-icing salt applied.
Competition in road management is one of the goals. Finnra is striving
to develop and promote competition in the domains of construction
and planning in a controlled manner and revise the agency's competitive
bidding and contractual practices.
About Our Information Services:
The essential information services such as Technology Transfer
(Finn T2) and Library services remained in the administration part
when the organization was divided.
Finnra Library's main task is to serve the Finnra staff. So far
the Finnish Road Enterprise is our inside customer. As the Road
Enterprise is located in the same building and because the staff
was used to having access to Finnra library services, the Road enterprise
decided to buy the services from us. We have set up a contract for
this year. Without the contract they would have been our external
customers getting only limited services like borrowing publications
but not being able to suggest new acquisitions or participate in
routing of magazines.
Finnra Library is quite limited with only two full-time employees.
However, we are an important transportation information source and
almost the only domestic transport related library these days. Due
to reduction of education of civil engineers in Finnish universities
a couple of research libraries have been downsized in transportation
area. Currently there are only two universities having a transport
related special library and these libraries only serve their own
students and teachers.
The lack of a big special library dealing with road construction
and ground transportation, as well as providing services with all
the transportation community has been recognized and there are plans
to elevate Finnra Library to fill the gap. I would be very much
in favor of our Library having an official status as the central
library in the transportation field. This is just a plan. A supporting
team for the library is considering the alternatives.
In spite of our present limited resources we welcome foreign requests
and send copies of our items free of charge if there are extra ones
in library collection. Otherwise we are happy to lend them. We are
also responsible for disseminating Finnra publications internationally
and we have publications exchange agreements with other Nordic transportation
libraries.
Regarding the US libraries, those of our publications including
an English abstract are available through TRIS database. We send
our publications to Institution for Transportation Studies Library
in Berkeley, which then conveys the citations to TRIS. Those of
our items which are entirely in English are also available in the
Library of the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
We contribute to the ITRD database by sending records of about
50-60 Finnra research reports annually to ITRD.
After I had attended some of your US meetings and saw how well
your transportation community works, I was inspired to start a sort
of Northern cooperation between Road Transportation Libraries in
Scandinavia and the Baltic. Our first meeting took place in Helsinki
in Autumn 1998, supported by the International Unit of Finnra, and
so far we have met four times. The latest one was in Reykjavik,
Iceland, in May this year, when we had a two-day colloqui at the
Public Roads Administration of Iceland. Next year we are planning
to have a meeting in connection with the APOA (Advisory Panel of
Outreach Activities of OECD) seminar in Lithuania.
Our meetings have been very profitable so far. Now we know each
other personally and have a listserv. Perhaps you have read about
our meetings in TD Bulletin. Now I think our team might need some
new ideas and goals. It would be useful to expand the "Northern
circle" to comprise several European countries. Perhaps this
conference will provide with new ideas on how to elaborate the European
network.
This conference in St. Petersburg will be an extraordinary opportunity
to develop our cooperation between the USA and Europe and I'm extremely
grateful to you who have organized this event. Every gathering in
your country (this is my 4th one) has aroused new thoughts and ideas
and since the ITIR in 1995 I think we have made a lot of progress
and promoted information exchange enormously. It's great to be able
to attend this conference.
| 
