Cross-cutting Issues

Vehicular and truck traffic across the George Washington Bridge facility increased substantially throughout the late 1990s, mainly as a result of a booming US and New York-New Jersey metro area economy. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey recognized that action had to be taken to prevent deterioration of the region’s mobility. With an inability to construct new capacity for many reasons, the Port Authority turned to technology for a solution to the growing travel demand. In 1997, the Port Authority embarked on a project to deploy a unique Intelligent Transportation System at the George Washington Bridge. This paper focuses on the origins, motivations, procurement, complex system integration and installation of Intelligent Transportation System technologies in the specific areas of Incident Management and Traveler Information.

ITS America Coordinating Council

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Presented at the 11th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

This paper reviews traffic signal preemption and priority for emergency vehicles and transit buses respectively, with a focus on technology. Since the technologies traditionally associated with preemption and priority deal primarily with vehicle detection, detection technologies are examined first, in terms of their functionality, strengths, and limitations. Past deployments of these technologies are then reviewed in terms of results and lessons learned. Given the many stakeholders affected by preemption and priority, requirements become an important consideration; the paper attempts to match the detection technologies with requirements developed as part of a regional study in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

George Mason University

Presented at the 11th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

As part of the AZTech ITS initiatives, the Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) distributed WAP phones in the fall of 2000 to selected individuals working in transportation agencies in the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area. These phones offered the recipients both local and long distance telephone service, along with use of the Internet and the ability to access real-time traffic information over the WAP phone, all free of charge. Traffic Station was the Independent Service Provider for the traffic information, and they offered this wireless service from the time the phones were distributed until they terminated their service in August 2001. In order to assess the benefits and future potential for this new technology and its utility as a tool for obtaining traffic information, MCDOT requested Battelle to conduct a survey of the WAP phone users. Battelle recommended telephone interviews with each user and developed an interview protocol to carry out the evaluation. This report documents the results of interviews with 13 out of 14 users, conducted between October 5 and 19, 2001. MCDOT commissioned this evaluation to document the various ways WAP technology could be used in the Phoenix metropolitan area and to understand how the users perceived the benefits and drawbacks of this technology. This information could be of interest outside of the Phoenix area, as well as for considering a possible expansion of this program in Phoenix in the future. While quantitative data were collected from the 13 users in these interviews, as presented in this report, the very small sample makes it difficult to generalize the findings. Nevertheless, the results, coupled with discussions with each of the users, provide a rich qualitative overview of this technology experiment.

Battelle Memorial Institute 

Maricopa County DOT

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 19-22, 2003 Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Condition Acquisition and Reporting System (CARS) was developed from the beginning to conform to developing national Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) standards that have been or are being produced by various Standards Development Organizations (SDOs). Over the course of the past year, the maturity of the system has reached a level where the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) is beginning to really experience the true benefits of the following these standards.

This paper reports on several key areas where standards have proven significant cost and efficiency benefits for Mn/DOT, including:

- Data exchange from two or more different systems

- Data output to information service providers

- The receipt of data from external systems

- Maintaining ownership of software for the Minnesota 511 system

- Easy expansion to innovative, research-oriented initiatives.

Minnesota DOT

Castle Rock Consultants

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 19-22, 2003 Minneapolis, Minnesota

This paper will present an overview of this Strategic ITS Plan with highlights on the unique aspects of the Plan as it relates to multi-modal operations. The focus will be on how the Plan achieves a balance between moving automobiles, transit vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians within the City. It will describe the core motives behind the Plan that defines $250M of initiatives over its 30-year horizon. It will also describe how Program’s specific needs were used to derive ITS initiatives that involve a great deal of multi-modal operations and system integration.

City and County of San Francisco

DKS Associates

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 19-22, 2003 Minneapolis, Minnesota