Personal Mobility

This white paper, DMS Message Effectiveness Tool—Signs of Intelligence for Successful Communities, offers practical advice, case studies, and the Skyline Products DMS Message Effectiveness Tool to help agencies develop their policies regarding effective Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) usage. A key to effective advisories is displaying messages that are clear, concise, credible, and actionable—such advisories help the agency achieve the greatest results for its Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)environment.

Specifically, the goal of this white paper is to be a reference tool for any DOT agency developing or tuning its policy on the use of DMS messages. Such a policy would provide guidelines for DMS managers and operators to relay clear, informative, and relevant messages. This is an important consideration, since motorists must be able to quickly comprehend the DMS advisory, filter the information as it relates to their situation, and take appropriate action. Of course, this all happens in a matter of seconds, while drivers speed along in complex traffic conditions and often in less-than-ideal weather conditions.

Skyline Products

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

Increasingly, transit authorities are harnessing advances in sensor, payment, and enforcement
technologies to operate parking facilities more efficiently by enhancing customer parking
experiences and thereby increasing ridership and overall revenue. In the short term, these
innovations promise to increase the effective supply of existing parking with minimal
investment. Over the longer term, these systems could further expand ridership by generating
revenue to add parking capacity and improve access. This paper reports on the Smart Parking
Pilot Project on the COASTER commuter rail line in San Diego (California, USA), which
builds on the transit-based smart parking field test research conducted at the Rockridge San
Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District station. The paper begins with a literature
review on parking management and pricing and the optimization of parking resources at
transit facilities. Next, the authors describe results of an initial pilot feasibility study. Finally,
the phased smart parking implementation plan, carefully tailored to address key transit-related
parking problems at the station and corridor levels, is described along with the pilot project’s
evaluation criteria.

University of California, Berkeley

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

This paper describes the deployment of the Smart-SIGNAL technology in the City of
Pasadena, CA – collecting and archiving event-based traffic signal data simultaneously at
several intersections along one major arterial corridor. Smart-SIGNAL generates timedependent
performance measures for both individual intersections and arterials including
intersection queue length and arterial travel time. The paper describes lessons learnt during
the deployment and focuses on the analysis of the resultant information, and its value for
traffic operations as well for the traveling public.

Author: Michael Wieck

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

SRF Consulting Group, Inc., in cooperation with Scott County, designed a transit station that
provides Scott County residents with a new commuting option to downtown Minneapolis.
Working with Scott County and other local agencies, SRF designed the bus park-and-ride
station to sensitively fit into a developing commercial and residential area. 
 
Located near TH 169 and CSAH 18, the station is comprised of several main functions: a bus
turn-around and drop-off area, a passenger waiting area with shelters, a 550-car surface
parking lot, and an access road with walks. 
 
The ITS elements of this project include:
 
·  A traveler information system designed to continuously count the lot capacity and inform
approaching vehicles of parking space availability in the lot with real- time information. 
·  A wireless telemetry system.
·  Changeable message signs incorporated into decorative landscape monuments.
·  A six-camera security system with on-site digital video recording.
 
The project was awarded “2007 Project of the Year” by the Association of Minnesota
Counties.

SRF Consulting Group, Inc.

Scott County

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

Until recently the focus in traffic signal preemption and priority has been on developing and extending the capabilities of various technologies and studying their impact on real or hypothetical traffic flows. As these technologies have been implemented, however, institutional issues both before and after implementation have been recognized as significant. This paper examines the differing issues, needs, and concerns that elected officials and transit, traffic and emergency personnel in the Washington, D.C. region have regarding the implementation, installation, maintenance and use of both types of systems. Based on interviews with 37 area officials, system objectives and requirements were identified. The agencies and jurisdictions represented have very different levels of familiarity and experience with preemption and priority systems. For a signal preemption system the objectives identified were that it shall significantly reduce response time to emergencies, improve the safety and health of emergency personnel, and reduce accidents between non-emergency vehicles due to the passage of responding emergency units at intersections where it is installed. Stakeholders also suggested four policy requirements for priority systems. A signal priority system for transit shall improve schedule adherence, improve the efficiency with which buses run, be part of a lager ITS system that includes improved rider information and other services, and increase the overall efficiency with which the road network is used by contributing to an increase in bus ridership. The interviews also revealed that in order to achieve these objectives the systems were required to meet a number of requirements such as regional interoperability and the potential to hold users accountable. In all six system requirements were clearly defined.

George Mason University

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

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