Transportation

BenefITs of InTellIgenT TransporTaTIon sysTems
Applying information technology to a country’s trans- portation network delivers five key classes of benefits by: 1) increasing driver and pedestrian safety, 2) im- proving the operational performance of the transpor- tation network, particularly by reducing congestion, 3) enhancing personal mobility and convenience, 4) de- livering environmental benefits, and 5) boosting pro- ductivity and expanding economic and employment growth.


Increasing driver and pedestrian safety
Intelligent transportation systems can deliver impor- tant safety benefits. There are 1.2 million fatalities annually on the world’s roadways. In 2007, a traffic accident occurred every five seconds in the United States (totaling over 6 million accidents), with a traf- fic fatality occurring every 13 minutes, killing 41,059 Americans and causing approximately 2.6 million inju- ries. (In 2008, 5.8 million crashes led to 37,261 fatali- ties.)²⁹ European Union countries experience a similar number of accidents and fatalities, with 42,943 deaths on European Union roadways in 2006.³⁰ Japan expe- rienced 887,000 traffic accidents in 2006, injuring 1.1 million victims and causing 6,300 fatalities.³¹ A wide range of ITS-based applications—from real-time traf- fic alerts, to cooperative intersection collision avoid- ance, to on-vehicle systems such as anti-lock braking, lane departure, collision avoidance, and crash notifi- cation systems—have safety as a principle focus. For example, a study of ramp metering in Minneapolis, Minnesota, found that metering reduced total crashes on area roadways between 15 and 50 percent.³² The
U.S. IntelliDrive system could potentially address 82 percent of the vehicle crash scenarios involving unim- paired drivers.³³

In fact, intelligent transportation systems are leading to a fundamental rethinking of vehicle safety. Over the

past 50 years, most of the developments in transporta- tion safety—such as the mandatory installation and use of seat belts in the 1970s and the installation of airbags in the 1980s—were designed to protect passengers in the event of a crash. But as Peter Appel, the current Administrator of the U.S. Department of Transpor- tation’s (DOT) Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), notes, “All of those technolo- gies assumed there would be a crash. However, much of the work in the next 50 years will be about avoiding the crash altogether and for that [systems like] Intel- liDrive have dramatic potential.”³⁴
ITS improve the performance of a country’s transportation system by maximizing the capacity of existing infrastructure, reducing to some degree the need to build additional highway capacity.