Explaining ITS


Hat tip to Clackamas County Chair (and fellow transportation wonk) Lynn Peterson, who passed on a pointer to this excellent video explaining what Intelligent Transportation Systems are all about.


18 responses to “Explaining ITS”

  1. Hi Jeff — what formatting problem are you seeing? I’m currently looking at the front page and the post page with Firefox on a Mac, and don’t see any problems. Let me know what symptoms you see and what browser you’re using and I’ll check it out.

    And yes, it is time for a redesign, thanks so much for volunteering. :-)

  2. On second thought it might have been Vista (can’t remember which PC it was)–although the browser ought to behave similarly on both platforms…

  3. Cameron — I’ll just make the inevitable reference to “boarding rides” before anyone else does — and just leave it at that and hope everyone else just gets back to the topic of Intelligent Transportation Systems.

  4. I use Linux quite a bit, actually- (and prefer it). The Windoze machine in question is my wife’s laptop. :)

  5. That’s part of the promise of ITS: the less time people spending driving around looking for parking/etc means lower VMT & VHT. The net effect is fewer cars on the road.

    The video did a good job of showing how ITS might help by providing real-time information to travelers so they can make better decisions. It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.

  6. It didn’t do such of a good job of showing how this will actually happen.

    Probably because IBM AU/NZ, the vendor and systems integrator who published this video, would just _love_ to chat with policymakers about how IBM thinks this will happen, and just what IBM products/services it will take to make it happen. :-)

  7. The first thing that occurs to me about “smart” transportation is to get government to time the friggen lights so the traffic can flow!

  8. When I was exposed to ITS, it was a federal program generating lots of documentation and trying to set standards (probably prematurely), while local agencies & DOTs were Just Doing It. I’m not in that loop now – does anyone know if the federal program is producing anything useful? (Now we have RITA: http://www.rita.dot.gov/about_rita/)

  9. There is a regional ITS group that includes a lot of people from city, state and Metro. Federal contributions are funding a number of regional projects.

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