Explaining International IT Application Leadership: Intelligent Transportation Systems

Date: 1/3/2010

Source: International Technology and Innovation Foundation

This recently published report highlights Japan, South Korea and Singapore as world leaders in ITS. The report goes on to explain why these countries in particular have been successful in deploying ITS systems. The report comes from the International Technology and Innovation Foundation, an independent not-for-profit, public policy think-tank in the USA. 

The report analyses ITS policy developments in Europe and around the world and concludes that policy is a driving factor for successful ITS implementation.  It offers a list of ten policy principles for ITS that transportation policymakers the world over should follow:

1. Recognise ITS as a “force multiplier” for the transportation network, enabling maximum capacity to be extracted from existing transport provision
2. ITS enable countries to shift to performance-based transportation systems by facilitating better collection of data to measure performance
3. Governments have an important role to play in convening and co-developing platforms that enable industry, academics, and government entities at the federal, state, and local levels to collaborate on the development of ITS and technology
4. Governments need to articulate an ITS vision for their country, state, or community
5. Governments must provide funding for both ITS R&D and deployment
6. The most successful countries view their ITS investments as creating a platform through which the private sector can develop value-added products and services
7. Governments have a critical role to play in spearheading the co-development of interoperable standards for ITS services and platforms
8. Leading countries have fostered close alignment between transportation and telecommunications regulatory agencies and technology communities in their countries, recognising the critical importance of allocating wireless spectrum or radio frequencies for intelligent transportation systems
9. Governments should fund deployment of infrastructure to collect real time traffic information
10. Develop a national ITS technical architecture that can serve as the template for the implementation of ITS at a federal, state, provincial, regional, community, or other local level.

HA recommended to review the report

Key words: Policy