Cross-cutting Issues

The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) emphasizes the mainstreaming of ITS strategies into traditional transportation planning processes. This paper describes how a regional architecture can be developed to serve as a framework for planning, defining, and integrating regional ITS systems. While incorporating consensus based regional architectures into the planning arena will improve the position of ITS projects competing for Federal or State funding, the paper also argues that developing a regional architecture is consistent with and supportive of the traditional planning process. For example, regional architecture development engenders: a strong outreach component and the ability to mobilize traditional and non-traditional stakeholders, a complete assessment of the regional transportation system inventory and assets, a long term planning perspective and the consideration of incremental systems growth, a multi-modal / multi-jurisdictional approach to problem solving, the consideration of options during project development that address regional needs outside the immediate project scope, and data archiving opportunities to improve alternatives analyses, performance monitoring, and policy development. The paper discusses how regional ITS architectures can contribute to these and other planning activities and priorities.

ITERIS

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

Turning Movement Counts (TMC) are certainly the most common studies done at
intersections. Turning movement counts are used for coverage counts, warrant studies, and
for input for signal timing software. The traditional method to perform Turning Movement
Counts is manual use of a Jamar count board. This results in a relatively large variability in
the traffic counts at a given intersection from day to day, week to week etc. In addition, the
cost of performing manual counts prohibits extensive and frequent counts. This paper
describes different methods to automate turning movement counts using modern video
detection technology. Whereas one method is evolutionary, using video detection equipment
that may have been deployed for stop bar presence detection, a more revolutionary approach
makes use of recent developments in video processing to use regular CCTV feeds from an
intersection without the need of any additional field hardware.

Iteris, Inc.

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 3-5, 2010, Houston, Texas

In the transportation vocabulary, “anticipating” is gradually replacing ”reacting”.
Indeed, being able to forecast the evolution of the traffic in a network is a basis on
which many traffic management strategies and multiple ITS applications should
ideally rely. Real time prediction capabilities are therefore becoming a concrete need
for the management of networks, both for urban and interurban environments, and
today’s road operator expectations drive increasingly complex and exacting
requirements.

Transport Simulation Systems

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

This paper describes the uses of a cooperative control algorithm between on-board vehicle
computers and signal control computers that are connected by low-latency Dedicated Short-
Range Communications (DSRC) wireless into a single control loop. Deployed use cases include
environmental vehicle engine control, Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance System -
Violations (CICAS-V), advanced actuated traffic signal control and adaptive traffic signal
control.

Authors: Dave Miller, Brian Collum

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

In 2009, the Minnesota Department of Transportation selected an Arterial Travel Time
Measurement System using Bluetooth Technology as part of its 2009-2010 ITS Innovative
Idea Program. The project deploys 8 Bluetooth readers along CSAH 81 together with a
central web based analysis software. One key goal of this project is to demonstrate how the
travel time information may be used as a performance measure for arterial traffic
management and operations. This paper provides the results of this deployment and draws
conclusions for the use of Bluetooth based data collection for arterial traffic operations and
performance management.

Author: Michael Wieck

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