Canadian municipalities increasingly find themselves under pressure to provide more and better traveller information to the motoring, transitriding, and walking public. This paper showcases the City of Toronto's successful RoadInfo system. RoadInfo is a telephone-based traveller information system providing service to the public within the City of Toronto and across the Greater Toronto Area. The paper briefly reviews the benefits to be derived by ATIS systems, the development of RoadInfo system, the features RoadInfo provides, and its range of potential applications. The paper then identifies ATIS industry developments related to telephone-based services, and in particular, discusses the U.S. 511 standards, and the movement towards similar standards in Canada. The paper then outlines the 'lessons learned' through industry ATIS deployments, and through the development of the RoadInfo ATIS. Challenges in providing real-time information, changing roles for staff, managing contracted staff, and the industry challenges in developing a profitable ATIS business model are each discussed. The paper will conclude with a description of the potential development path for the RoadInfo system.
Abstract