Personal Mobility

Currently, many federal/state/local agencies are providing diverse public transportation service at the historically slow-growth rural areas. The integration of these available rural transit services can be greatly enhanced with the automated demand-responsive transits, and coordinated transit service equipped with the Intelligent Transportation System and Information Technology (ITS/IT) technologies. This paper discusses both the available ITS technologies and existing institution barriers that are essential to improve the quality of life at the rural communities.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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

The objective of this paper is to define a performance measure(s) that can be used to show congestion levels on critical corridors throughout Virginia and develop a general methodology to select and calculate performance measures in order to quantify congestion in a transportation system. These measures can be interpreted to provide benchmarks or base values of congestion to provide a means for measuring change in the performance of the highway system.

University of Virginia

Mega cities around the world are suffering from severe traffic congestion resulting in
economic losses via delayed time, fuel consumption, traffic accidents, air pollution and traffic
noise.  
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) is responding to the growing momentum for the
introduction of road pricing. MHI developed an urban environment-friendly road pricing
concept called IURP (Integrated Urban Road Pricing), and successfully conducted
demonstration tests. This paper describes following items;
1) Requirement for DSRC based IURP
2) One of IURP solution: System Overview and Technical descriptions
3) Evaluation and Demonstration test
4) Extensibility of Active DSRC based IURP

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.

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

Floating car- and loop detector-based methods are two different methods that are
most frequently employed to collect travel time delay information across a freeway network.
More often than not, these two methods are jointly used to achieve the necessary freeway
network coverage, because of either the high labor costs of the floating car-based method or the
dependence of the availability of sufficient freeway network instrumentation of the loop
detector-based method. For example, both floating car- and loop detector-based methods are
implemented in the Highway Congestion Monitoring Program in the California Department of
Transportation. This situation makes it necessary to evaluate the compatibility in terms of
estimation accuracy between these two different data collection methods. In this paper, the
compatibility between these two methods was empirically evaluated. Corresponding delay
information estimated using both methods from 37 freeway segments in the Greater Sacramento
Area were collected and analyzed. It was found that the loop detector-based method is able to
estimate very similar delay to that as estimated by the floating car-based method, as long as the
later is enhanced by the real time loop-detector measured traffic flow information. The average
difference is less than six percent (6%) when delay is defined using a reference speed of 60 mph
or higher. It was also found that a one-mile spacing of loop detectors and 15-minute floating car
interval were sufficient to achieve such compatibility. This research supported that loop
detector-based method might be a more cost-effective choice for travel time delay data
collection if the freeway system is sufficiently instrumented.

California Department of Transportation

Villanova University

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

This paper reports on traveler (primarily commuter) perception of commercial radio traffic information. Data includes opinions expressed by participants in two efforts undertaken by the Michigan Department of Transportation (the DIRECT Operational Test and the Southeast Michigan ITS Expansion Evaluation). In both instances, participants were selected because they travel the expressway system in the Detroit Metropolitan area. The primary objective of the paper is to suggest ways in which commercial radio traffic information can be improved upon. The paper is divided into seven sections: data sources, study participants, participant use of commercial radio traffic information, subject rating of the performance of commercial radio traffic information, subject rating of the benefit of using commercial radio traffic information, subject suggestions of ways to improve the system under consideration, and implications for new information systems.

At the outset of the study, some members of the evaluation team thought that some form of new information service could potentially supplant or supersede commercial radio as a source of traffic information. Contrary to this notion, the study revealed that drivers very much appreciate and rely on commercial radio as a source of traffic information. Nevertheless, drivers do find some fault with commercial radio-based traffic information and have suggested a variety of ways to improve the usefulness of this information. The observations herein lead to a conclusion that a personalized route-specific interrupt or “push” system could be a valuable and readily accepted complement to commercial radio traffic information.

University of Michigan - Intelligent Transportation Systems Research Laboratory

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