The national Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) program started with the Intelligent Vehicle Systems Act included in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991. Related activities ongoing at that time as well as new efforts have been supported through this program both technically and financially. To move ITS from research, prototyping, and pilot projects into routine usage, decision makers at the corporate, state, regional, and local levels need reliable information about the contribution that ITS products can make towards meeting the demand for safe and efficient movement of people and goods. The experience of the US DOT has led to the definition of an Intelligent Transportation Infrastructure (ITI) consisting of traffic detection and monitoring, communications, and control systems required to support a variety of ITS products and services in metropolitan and rural areas. Whether infrastructure is deployed by the public sector, the private sector, or a combination of the two depends on the locality. The ITI provides the building blocks needed to effectively deploy and operate, as locally appropriate: a) traffic signal control systems; b) freeway management systems; c) transit management systems; d) incident management systems; e) electronic toll collection systems; and f) multimodal traveler information systems. While the total picture is not clear regarding how the ITS user servives enables by the ITI relate to all transportation needs, partial results are available from early ITS projects and related deployments. Significant benefits have been recorded in areas such as accident reduction, time savings, transit customer service, roadway capacity, emission reduction, fuel consumption, and vehicle stops. Analysis and simulation based on limited tests have predicted the potential for greater benefit with more extensive deployment of more mature products.
Samenvatting