Cross-cutting Issues

Congestion pricing is an important tool for managing demand and providing improved mobility.
Through the Urban Partners program, the United States Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT) has provided substantial grant funding to six sites in the U.S. to deploy a variety of congestion pricing and supporting strategies. These deployments provide a unique opportunity to demonstrate the impact and cost-effectiveness of congestion pricing as well as gauge the public’s reaction to pricing and document the lessons learned by the deployers. This paper describes the U. S. DOT plans for evaluating the Urban Partner deployments, including the key questions to be answered, evaluation methodologies, and the anticipated schedule.

Battelle

Research and Innovative Technology Administration

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

The 11th World Congress on Intelligent Transport System (ITS) held in 2004 in Nagoya was
considered as the first congress with the participation of citizens. As our institute locating in
Toyota City which is regarded as one of the most smart ITS towns in Japan, we organized a
series of seminars on ITS for the citizens living in Toyota City or the towns around. In this
paper, firstly we will report about the seminars. Then the results of questionnaires will be
reported. Further, the evaluation of the regional ITS in Toyota Region, the wants and needs of
users for ITS and effects of increasing the public awareness will analyzed. Finally, we will
make a summary for what we have achieved from this series of seminars.

Toyota Transportation Research Institute

TTRI, Japan

Presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 6-10, 2005, San Francisco, California

Weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems have been in use for several years, and the technology and accuracy have steadily improved. This paper describes the design, testing, and implementation of the first five Illinois State Toll Highway Authority (Tollway) WIM stations. Tollway applications employ a special configuration for enforcement by the Illinois State Police (ISP) in a way not typically implemented elsewhere, instantaneously identifying the type of apparent violation and displaying that to an ISP vehicle. WIM has proved to be valuable as an enforcement and engineering tool, since detailed vehicle statistics are automatically generated. The technology is important in helping limit damage that overweight trucks do to core infrastructure. The first few WIM stations have payback periods of one to two years, hence the agency expects to deploy about another seven WIM stations in the next few years. The paper addresses performance, adjustments needed, typical reports, and “lessons learned.” The need for proactive maintenance to assure a high level of performance in particular is highlighted.

Authors: John Benda, Jim Powell, Bill Hereth

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

It is evident that imaging sensors can offer a lot of capabilities to the intelligent transportation systems (ITS). With the increased use of image sensors, we are dealing with a large amount of image data which must be efficiently compressed for transmission and storage. The development of the intelligent transportation systems can benefit greatly from using digital image compression, processing and machine vision techniques. There has been significant progress in the development of wavelet-based image compression and image analysis in recent years. The basic software algorithms of wavelet analysis are now widely available. On the hardware side, the available wavelet compression board capable of providing a large compression ratio lacks the flexibility for ITS use.

A fully software based PC system using the wavelet compression has been developed. The system which employs a new wavelet compression procedure using the lifting scheme and the 3-D subband coding procedure [1][2] offers the flexibility much needed in ITS and is cost effective. Because of the severe bandwidth constraint, as a result of using telephone line for transmission, the compression ratio must be large. Taking all the factors into consideration, the speed that can be achieved in our final system is to send the compressed video through a 56K bits/sec. phone line at 2 frames per second. This will provide essential surveillance information for normal vehicle speed while achieving high quality reconstruction at a signal-to-noise ratio of 25 or above. Further effort has been made to equip the system with the capability of vehicle tracking and counting on the compressed video by using machine vision principles [3]. Detailed algorithms will be presented. The complete system is software based and is called Advanced Intelligent Transportation Systems or AITS. This paper is descriptive in nature and thus equations are not used. It is intended to be readable by transportation engineers. Starting with an introduction to the wavelet theory and a comparison of Fourier based approach with the wavelet-based approach, we examine the issues involved in applying the wavelet-based compression to the transportation surveillance, the requirements for traffic surveillance, etc. Illustrations showing the effects of excessive compression are given. A discussion of the need for and implementation of the lens defogging mitigation and a discussion of bad weather effects are presented. The algorithms for image processing and the vision based vehicle tracking and counting are also presented. Finally the technical and market potential and the issues of further product development and implementation are also presented.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

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

With the increasing of the tollways network in the countries, toll operations analyzing became an important task. In this way and to enhance planning, design, operation, management of plaza  and especially waiting time estimation in off peak and rush hours, traffic simulation models are used. Aside the actually analytical analysis and model simulation, we propose here a new neural approach with high confidence level.

National School of Engineers ENIT

IRISA Laboratory

Toll Division, Tunisia Highways

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York