ABSTRACT
In many countries of the world, the problems of crashes and congestion associated with ground transportation have reached unsupportable levels. In the traditionally “developed” nations of the world, there is no longer the space or land to continually build new roadways to deal with the congestion problem. Similar strictures are placed upon developing nations who are also experiencing an explosive growth in the number of vehicles on their roads. If information superhighways are important to sustained growth and development, how much more so are physical highways that carry people, goods, and vital services? The result of these trends is that we have overcrowded and dangerous highways upon which vehicles travel at progressively slower speeds as the transportation infrastructure spirals downward in decline. What can be done about this problem? The answer in many regions of the world is to turn to innovative and advanced technologies to solve the problems of congestion and safety. Across the globe this endeavor has had several labels: in Europe it has been referred to as Transportation Telematics; in Japan Advanced Transportation; but the phrase used here is the consensus term used in the United States — Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The National ITS Program Plan (1995) refers to its function as follows:
The reasoning behind ITS is clear. If technology can find ever more efficient ways to pack an increasing number of vehicles safely on to existing roadways, then politicians and administrators can avoid the unwelcome and unworkable alternative of ever more road-building programs. ITS seeks to accomplish this goal through the identification of user services which have been bundled according to specific domains (see Table 1). Many of these services are building blocks that can be combined for deployment in a number of different ways. For example, ITS provides an excellent
opportunity to improve the dissemination of real-time weather information (RWIS) to the travelling public but also to decision-makers routing aircraft, ground commercial
TABLE 1 Identified Bundles and Associate User Services
transport, or emergency management. Such services can be expected to change over time as different supportive technologies mature and different forms of inter-modal linkage are developed.
