ABSTRACT

According to the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) [24], surface transportation in the United States is at a crossroads. While the nation’s 4 million miles of paved roads are badly clogged with 200 million cars and congestion continues to increase, the conventional wisdom of building more roads will not work for both financial and environmental reasons.While congestion costs 100 billion dollars (Frank Kreith, pers. comm., May 16, 2000) annually in lost productivity, energy wastage, vehicle deterioration, road rage, and increased emissions fromvehicle idling, traffic accidents in 1993 alone caused 40,000 deaths and 5million injuries. In response to these problems, the U.S. Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation EfficiencyAct (ISTEA) of 1991, whose basic goal is to develop a national transportation system that is economically efficient, environmentally sound, and moves people and goods in an energy efficient manner. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), led by the Federal HighwayAdministration, has launched the IntelligentVehicle Highway System (IVHS) program to meet the demands of the ISTEA. IVHS does not aim to address the capacity problem. It aims to assist in steering drivers away from bottlenecks and in introducing and managing reasonable enforcement measures such as congestion pricing. Surface transportation-related problems are not unique to the United States. In fact, in countrieswith higher population densities such as Europe and Japan, the problem ismore acute. The Programme for a EuropeanTrafficwith Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety (PROMETHEUS) [45] project in Europe and the Advanced Mobile Traffic Information and Communication System (AMTICS) program [46] in Japan closely parallel the IVHS program in the United States.