Cross-cutting Issues

Several initiatives on the national Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) agenda will succeed only with strong central leadership to provide vision and coordination. Such programs typically offer tremendous benefits to the traveling public but for various reasons due to either to economic, legal, or social issues do not attract private capital to drive development and implementation. In contrast many items on the national agenda will succeed simply due to the promised economic benefits and/or cost reduction.

If I were in charge of the national ITS program I would emphasize three particular areas due to the reasons stated above. The three areas are: continued development of a national rural crash notification system (frequently referred to as a Mayday system), continued emphasis and funding of Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) in order to manage our nation’s freeway and interstate system in and about metropolitan areas, and continued development and research on Automated Vehicle Control Systems (AVCS) to eventually deliver on the ITS promise of additional capacity within the existing highway infrastructure.

ITS Essay Competition

Stanley E. Young

Kansas State University

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

The Virginia DOT Smart Travel Program unifies the ITS applications of all transportation modes and levels of government under one umbrella concept – Smart Travel. The NOVA Smart Travel Program planning process anticipates future transportation service needs, including the geographic and functional needs, and envisions complete Smart Travel systems to meet those needs. It directly addresses the need for planning and coordination in system development, and also provides a solid foundation for the development of a VDOT centric Northern Virginia ITS architecture. While a Metropolitan Washington regional ITS architecture and Maryland Statewide ITS architecture are undertaken at the same time, it provides an unique opportunity for three architecture teams to work cooperatively in producing architectures in a consistent manner. Due to the development of the Metropolitan Washington regional ITS architecture that will address regional stakeholders’ interconnects, VDOT could therefore focus on a VDOT NOVA Centric ITS architecture development.

VDOT Northern Virginia District

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

At least 30 major cities and metropolitan areas in the U.S. have implemented real-time traffic-information web sites to provide pretrip traffic information. Although many web-sitedesign guidelines exist, no design guidelines were found specific to the construction of traffic-information web sites. The project upon which this paper was based set out to develop such guidelines. In the process, 4 methods used to help design a usable web site were evaluated: (1) user analysis, (2) heuristic evaluation, (3) guideline application, and (4) user testing. This paper describes the major findings from each method and the strengths and weaknesses identified for each method. Although there were distinct benefits from each method, guidelines use and user testing were found to be the most beneficial methods given the likely resources available in the Traffic Management Center (TMC) to develop a traffic-information web site.

University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI)

Matsushita Communication Industrial Co. Ltd.

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), implemented all over the world, has evolved into an important and practical traffic management technique. ITS can improve the safety and operational efficiency for both inter-city and inner-city movement of people and goods through innovative ITS users’ services. However, the realization of the ITS deployment relies on the proper considerations of the planning, design, development, and implementation of the ITS elements on the regional basis.

This paper summarizes the practical ITS system planning/design and regional ITS deployment considerations using Taiwan, Republic of China (ROC) as a practical example case study. As indicated, the regional ITS planning and deployment process should address ITS requirements, national system architecture, market and technology evolution, system life-cycle benefit/cost evaluation, international system specification and standards, existing system renovation, and user community’s acceptance. Most of all, the system architecture should accommodate the incremental and future upgrade that can address practical regional ITS deployment needs as system evolves.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) is widely used in tracking vehicles and is superior to conventional technologies based on certain important criteria. This article investigates the feasibility of tracking vehicles with regular GPS devices. Since downtown is generally the “heart” of a city with high density of vehicles and activities, locating vehicles precisely there is extremely important. Our field tests, however, find that GPS cannot efficiently track vehicles in downtown streets, although it works well on freeways. In this paper, we specifically analyze errors of GPS measured positions and the availability of satellite signals in both freeway and downtown scenarios

University of Washington - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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