The 1996 Summer Olympic Games presented challenges for everyone involved. The organisers were faced with the largest population of athletes and officials ever assembled for a sporting event. Additionally, the spectator count for the 1996 games exceeded that of Seoul and Barcelona put together. Local transportation management agencies were faced with the challenge of handling this surge of people while still providing safe, efficient, and economical transportation services to the public. The problems associated with absorbing the Olympic transportation fleet into the existing transit system, developing region wide concensus on incident management and congestion mitigation plans, and establishing the capability to manage increased traffic raised serious management challenges. Despite these hurdles, the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta became a success story for the state and local transportation management agencies involved. This achievement was in no small way due to the deployment of a robust suite of integrated intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications. However, as one might imagine, there were some valuable lessons learned along the way.
Abstract