Cross-cutting Issues

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) is performing the College Station Integration
Project to improve arterial operations and emergency vehicle routing at intersections with
railroad grade crossings within the project area. The focus is delivering real-time video
and rail monitoring information to the College Station Fire Department.
The critical task for this project is the design of a communications system for the corridor
that can handle high-bandwidth applications. This paper presents the results of an
analysis of the communications system needs, the range of possible solutions and the
reasons why Gigabit Ethernet was chosen for the solution. This paper also presents the
Phase I communication system design as well as a discussion of the challenges that still
remain. Innovative solutions for a full range of equipment needs in the traffic signal
cabinet are also presented, based upon the use of Gigabit Ethernet as the communications
backbone.

Texas Transportation Institute

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 29-May 2, 2002, Long Beach, California

This paper details information on the development of a guidance document for implementing real-time transit information systems that is scheduled to be published by the Federal Transit Administration in the second quarter of 2003. The guidance document is intended to provide relevant and practical information on planning, implementation, operational, and maintenance issues along with any solutions to the challenges faced by transit agencies that have successfully implemented real-time information systems. The background research for this guidance document included a literature review on existing systems and site visits and telephone interviews of key staff at selected transit agencies that have successfully deployed real-time transit information systems.

Battelle Memorial Institute

Multisystems

Federal Transit Administration

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

It is a truism that new technology-driven applications often fail for institutional
reasons that have nothing to do with the technology. Yet, weaknesses within the technology
itself may hinder successful deployment. Accordingly, it has been proposed that to predict
whether a new application will succeed in the marketplace, it must pass three tests of feasibility:
technical, operational, and economic. The authors report the result of applying these three tests
to an application that is gaining widespread interest in the U.S. following its acceptance in
Europe: red light cameras. The three tests may be described as whether the system meets legal
standards, performs with sufficient accuracy to be accepted, and enjoys the support of the public
(technical feasibility), whether system costs are in line with revenue (fiscal feasibility), and
whether the system improves safety through reductions in violations and crash severity
(operational feasibility). The study found that cameras as applied in Virginia largely pass the
first test of technical feasibility: they are legally sound, technologically accurate, and supported
by the public. They pass a limited fiscal analysis: they do not generate revenue to the extent
critics suggest; however, data quality prevents a full economic feasibility test from being
undertaken. In terms of operational feasibility, the cameras potentially reduce crashes related to
red light running; however, because they are correlated with an increase in total injury crashes, a
better understanding of crash severity—e.g., the degree of injury—is required.

University of Virginia, USA

Virginia Transportation Research Council, USA

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

This paper presents a framework and tools developed to study the sensitivity of traffic data
quality to detectors location and spacing. Our ultimate objective is to formulate generalized
detector deployment guidelines that are based on the functional needs of practitioners, and for which funding can be objectively justified. Our approach consists in using trajectory sets obtained from field experiments and traffic simulation models as ground truth, and to run a traffic detector model from which we extract information that would normally be available to practitioners. Ground truth information and detector-generated information are compared through selected quality benchmark measures, and we search detector configurations that optimize this comparison. We test both model-based and so-called naïve traffic estimation techniques, and find that while the former is superior, the difference becomes negligible as detector density increases. ½ mile spacing seems to always yield reasonably good information, but no such analysis should overlook detector failure rates. We conclude that those must be taken into account in the formulation of deployment guidelines, a step we defer to further studies.

University of California, Berkeley

University of Minnesota

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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

Improving intermodal transport management across modes, company responsibilities and
national borders is a complex undertaking. This paper discusses the challenges to achieve a
collaborative, advanced transport chain management system responding to the European
Commission`s recent Freight Transport Logistics Action Plan. The paper outlines a practical
solution based on a case of inland waterway transport of heavy cargo along the river Elbe for
export via Hamburg. The case is one of nine business cases which are participating in
FREIGHTWISE, an EU-sponsored project in the 6 Framework Programme.

BMT Group Ltd

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