Transportation

Nationwide, in Japan

for expanding ETC so private companies can offer au- tomatic toll collection options, such as in private park- ing garages. Japan also regularly uses variable-toll pric- ing, easy to implement electronically, to variably price tolls as a means to manage traffic flow and congestion in metropolitan areas.

Aggressively applying ITS to its public transporta- tion system, Japan has begun implementation of a nationwide bus location system. The country defined in March 2006 standard formats for bus information data exchange. While many Japanese cities have imple- mented real-time bus status updates via Web and mo- bile platforms, the coverage is not yet nationwide and does not appear to be implemented to the extent that it has been in South Korea and Singapore yet.

Japan uses probe vehicles not only to support provi- sion of real-time traffic information, but also to en- able sophisticated administration of road services by monitoring and evaluating the state of transportation system performance and making the results public. For example, by facilitating before and after evalua- tion of road projects, probe data was able to quantify that a bridge project in Niigata city reduced congestion by 25,900 hours, saving ¥106 million. Using informa- tion technology, Japan enhances the accountability of its road administrators by illustrating the effect of road construction and improvement projects in addressing

traffic congestion with three-dimensional maps of traf- fic congestion using data on traffic volume and travel time collected from probe cars (Figure 5).