Intelligent Transportation Systems Benefits, Costs, and Lessons Learned

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) provide a proven set of strategies for advancing transportation safety, mobility, and environmental sustainability by integrating communication and information technology applications into the management and operation of the transportation system across all modes. In the future, ITS technologies will transform surface transportation by offering a connected environment among vehicles, the infrastructure and passengers' wireless devices, allowing drivers to send and receive real-time information about potential hazards and road conditions. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s (U.S. DOT) ITS research program focuses on the overall advancement of ITS through investments in emerging ITS technologies, as well as supporting the evaluation of deployed ITS. This report presents information on the benefits, costs, and lessons learned regarding ITS planning, deployment, and operations obtained from almost twenty years of evaluation data. The report is based upon three related Web-based databases, known collectively as the ITS Knowledge Resources (KRs). The Knowledge Resources were developed by the U.S. DOT’s ITS Joint Program Office (JPO) evaluation program to support informed decision making regarding ITS investments by tracking the effectiveness of deployed ITS. The Knowledge Resources contain over eighteen years of summaries of the benefits, costs, and lessons learned of specific ITS implementations, drawn primarily from written sources such as ITS evaluation studies, research syntheses, handbooks, journal articles, and conference papers. They can be accessed online at www.itskrs.its.dot.gov. The report has been developed as a collection of factsheets presenting information on the performance of deployed ITS, as well as information on the costs, and lessons learned regarding ITS deployment and operations. The report has been designed to be flexible for the user. There are a total of 27 factsheets representing the 16 taxonomy areas. Four of the taxonomy areas (arterial management, freeway management, transit management, and driver assistance) have enough data and breadth of functionality to require more than one factsheet.