The Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Knowledge Resources, sponsored by the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), consist of five related websites: the ITS Benefits Database; the ITS Costs Database; the ITS Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource; the ITS Deployment Statistics Database; and the ITS Applications Overview.
The goal of these websites is to assist transportation decision makers, state and local government agencies, metropolitan planning organizations and researchers in realizing the costs, benefits and lessons learned of ITS, as well as in understanding the underlying technologies and systems and how and where they have been deployed. The purpose of this article is to introduce the reader to this rich source of ITS information, which is accessible at www.itsoverview.its.dot.gov.
The ITS Benefits Database provides quick and easy access to summary information discussing evaluations of deployed ITS systems around the U.S. and the world. Posted on the website are concise summaries of evaluation findings, highlighting the quantitative effects identified in these ITS evaluations.
The ITS Costs Database contains two types of cost data: unit costs (the costs of individual ITS elements) and system costs identifying project-related costs of different ITS deployments.
The ITS Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource provides access to knowledge gained through the experiences of transportation stakeholders in their planning, deployment, operations and maintenance of ITS to better equip transportation professionals to make informed decisions in future ITS deployments.
The ITS Deployment Statistics Database compiles and summarizes responses to survey questions about how much ITS technology has been deployed throughout the country. Surveys are administered both statewide and to metropolitan areas.
The ITS Applications Overview integrates the information collected within the four resources above to provide one-stop shopping for users looking for data about ITS services or technologies.
Knowledge power
For ease of use, each of the knowledge resources starts out with a similar home page with similar navigation options.
Each of the ITS Knowledge Resource websites organizes information by the ITS application areas. These applications form the backbone of the ITS Applications Overview website, which provides links to each of the other sites according to these categories. Additional search features tailor the presentation of data to the characteristics of each resource. For instance, the ITS Benefits and Lessons Learned websites can be searched by goal areas of ITS deployment identified by the U.S. DOT: safety; customer satisfaction; efficiency (capacity and throughput improvements on the transportation infrastructure due to ITS); energy and environmental impact (fuel savings, emissions); mobility (delay or travel time); and productivity (cost savings to transportation agencies, operators or travelers).
The ITS Costs Database can be searched by unit costs and system costs, while the ITS Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource can be searched by nine lesson categories. Each website also allows searching by keyword or topic from the search feature in the upper-right corner of the home page. This article will discuss each of these search options in further detail.
When navigating the site, a user might be looking for benefits, costs or lessons from specific geographic areas; findings from specific projects; relevant resources on similar projects; or national trends on ITS deployment. The scenarios below demonstrate techniques for assessing each of these kinds of information.
ITS Benefits Database
Suppose you worked for a city where the mayor had just directed his staff to reduce the carbon footprint of the city and its population. After transit-signal priority (TSP) was floated in a brainstorming meeting, it has fallen to you to investigate the potential impacts of such a program.
The ITS Benefits Database contains 26 entries describing the effect of TSP; you can find them by browsing the application areas or by using the search capabilities on the website. Browsing by application area will be demonstrated for the examples here.
Following the link to arterial management systems will lead you to a page presenting many examples of the effect of various ITS strategies on the performance of arterial roadways and street networks. TSP is one of the categories presented. Each entry in the ITS Benefits Database presents context information on the project that was deployed, the evaluation conducted to assess that project and a short synopsis of the quantitative effect of that ITS application. Links to source documentation are provided when those documents are available online.
Reviewing the findings available on TSP reveals experiences in six U.S. and Canadian cities and four overseas studies (two Asian and two European) that document public transit travel time improvements from 1 to 15% along routes with TSP. Four other studies found fuel consumption reductions from 3 to 19% for buses with TSP. This quick review of findings indicates there may be some potential for transit-signal priority to help lower a city’s carbon footprint. You will want to review the cases presented to find those most applicable to your location. Further reading also will reveal confounding issues such as the influence of TSP on other traffic and the tradeoff of potential ridership gains to reduce total traffic emissions. These are important considerations as you prepare your findings, and the ITS Benefits Database presents these relevant findings to you in an easily accessible format.
ITS Costs Database
Suppose you have been asked to consider the potential of different value pricing approaches for improving the efficiency of the transportation system, and how to deal with congestion, pollution, energy and other problems related to automobile use in a region. You have been asked to investigate the application of congestion pricing on the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes in a jurisdiction. To support your study, you need to evaluate the costs and prepare a cost analysis.
One approach to developing relevant costs is to turn to the ITS Costs Database. The ITS Costs Database contains estimates of ITS costs that can be used for developing project cost estimates during the planning process or preliminary design phase and for policy studies and cost-benefit analyses.
To begin searching the ITS Costs Database for congestion pricing examples, you could search under the application area of Electronic Payment and Pricing, similar to the benefits example above. However, to experience the range of available search features, you can locate the system cost summaries for congestion pricing by using the key word search feature at the top of the home page.
Searching in this manner leads to a page presenting three system cost summaries for congestion pricing.
Reviewing these results finds a system cost summary for converting HOV lanes in Georgia. The entry indicates that in Georgia, cost estimates for converting HOV lanes to managed lanes range from $20.9 million to $23.7 million. You decide to investigate this entry further.
Following the link for this example, the background information is provided at the top portion of the summary. Links to source documentation for all the websites are provided when those documents are available online. In this case, there is a link to the Georgia report, because it is publicly available. This report presented three concepts, each with its own cost or price tag; these are identified in the cost summary box. Each concept is described along with details of the corresponding cost estimate.
At the end of the entry, you will find that you can link directly to relevant unit cost components; following the links will direct you to these unit costs. Following the unit cost links may bring you to components that you will be considering in your evaluation. Unit cost data is provided in both unadjusted costs and costs that have been adjusted using specific indexes representative of the components. Working with both the system cost of sample deployments and unit costs should assist you in developing your project cost estimate.
ITS Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource
Lessons learned are the experiences of transportation stakeholders in their planning, deployment, operations, maintenance and evaluation of ITS. The primary objective is to provide other stakeholders with convenient access to the lessons learned knowledge so they can make informed decisions in their future ITS actions. Lessons are collected primarily from ITS case studies, best-practice compendiums, planning and design reviews and evaluation studies.
In this example, your agency is planning for the implementation of a 5-1-1 system. Your public affairs department has asked you to investigate how other agencies have marketed their 5-1-1 systems successfully. Using the ITS Lessons Learned Knowledge Resource, you begin your search. Again, there are several ways to search for this information. Among the search options, you could search the Applications Area under Traveler Information, or you could search by Lesson Category under Leadership & Partnerships (Awareness and Outreach). You also could use the search feature and search on 5-1-1. To demonstrate another search option, the Lesson Classifications search feature will be used to search under Traveler Information and Customer Satisfaction.
Our findings indicate that there are 38 experiences related to traveler information under the goal area of customer satisfaction. Of these, there are 13 lessons that reference 5-1-1 systems, the first of which happens to discuss marketing a 5‑1‑1 system.
Further investigation of this experience identifies two specific ways the Arizona Department of Transportation pursued a marketing program for their 5-1-1 system. Other lessons also provide successful implementations of 5‑1‑1 system marketing efforts. If you seek additional information or clarification on any of these experiences, contact information has been made available. You can then take this information to your public affairs division to help map out a plan of action to market your agency’s 5‑1‑1 system.
Deployment Statistics
The ITS Deployment Statistics website contains information on the deployment of ITS technology nationwide. This information is gathered through a series of national surveys to track the level of deployment of ITS technology in metropolitan and rural areas.
The ITS deployment information supports many users: the U.S. DOT to determine what is going on and where action is needed to stimulate deployment or integration; state and local planners who want to know what is working, what other areas have deployed and where they can get more information; and researchers and vendors who want to know market trends and how deployment matches local conditions.
Building on the above assignment to investigate TSP, you may be interested in finding out where TSP has been deployed and how many locations have been implemented nationwide. Turning to the website and following the arterial management link, there are 38 metropolitan areas that have deployed TSP amounting to 2% of the signalized intersections nationwide being outfitted with TSP equipment. Further investigation shows the amount deployed by each metropolitan area.
The ITS Deployment Statistics Database is rich with data and is a great resource for identifying national trends in ITS as well as deployments by state. As with the other websites, the deployment site offers numerous ways to navigate the site to obtain results easily.
Applications Overview
The ITS Applications Overview integrates information from a number of information resources to provide one-stop shopping for users looking for data about ITS technologies. The ITS Applications Overview brings all of the resources together and sorts all the ITS technologies into 16 application areas. This website provides access to a broad selection of information tied to a particular application area. For every application area selected, the website returns a questions page. The questions page provides a definition of the application area and then lists a series of questions relating to benefits, costs, lessons, deployment and other resources. Following the links takes you to information from different resources tied to the particular application area and will take you to the websites already discussed.
Easy access
The ITS Applications Overview also offers access to the ITS Resource Guide and additional evaluation documents. Any of the ITS Knowledge Resource website users can subscribe to the ITS Information Subscription Services, via e-mail or RSS feed, to receive information on updates to the websites in the application areas or lesson categories described above. All ITS Knowledge Resources offer a Contribute Data feature as well as a Comments feature on their websites. Readers are encouraged to offer comments and contribute data to further enrich these databases in order to provide more valuable resources to help ITS leaders make well-informed decisions in their ITS deployment initiatives.
This article just skims the surface of the wealth of information available through the ITS Knowledge Resources. To assist you further in your efforts to solve real-world transportation problems, each website offers online help pages, a help line, points of contact, an “About this site” feature and frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages. Later this year, the report “Intelligent Transportation Systems Benefits, Costs, Deployment and Lessons Learned: 2008 Update” will be available to further support informed decision making on ITS deployments.
As experience with ITS deployment and operations continues to grow, the web-based knowledge resources will continue to be updated to provide convenient access to this information. Users, especially from state and local agencies, are encouraged to submit, via the websites, additional evaluation reports discussing system impacts, costs or lessons learned.
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