Transportation

south Korea
South Korea’s strengths in several ITS application ar- eas make it a world leader in intelligent transportation systems. These strengths include: 1) real-time traffic in- formation provision, 2) advanced public transportation information systems, and 3) electronic fare payment and electronic toll collection. This section provides a brief background on the history of ITS deployment in South Korea and then analyzes current conditions.


ITS has been a national priority of South Korea since the late-1990s, when, recognizing the need to bring intelligence to its transportation system, South Ko- rea built the country’s legal and institutional supports for ITS with the formulation of its first national ITS master plan in 1997 and passage of the 1999 Transport System Efficiency Act, together which set ITS stan- dards, developed an ITS technical architecture, and specified a regional and supra-regional implementation plan.⁹⁵ South Korea charged the Ministry of Construc- tion and Transportation (MOCT) with spearheading ITS development. In December 2000, South Korea unveiled its National ITS Master Plan for the 21^st cen- tury, a 20-year blueprint for ITS development in South Korea that provided a strategic guideline for develop- ment of seven specific ITS application areas as part of a National ITS Service (Figure 6), along with time schedules and budgets.⁹⁶ The National ITS Service ad- dresses: traffic operations and management, electronic payments, information integration and dissemination, public transport quality enhancement, enhanced safety and automated driving, efficient commercial vehicles, and pollution control.⁹⁷ A central mission of the Na- tional ITS Service is to create a network of traffic sys- tems that facilitate interactions and interconnection between South Korea’s large cities.

The ITS Master Plan identified three phases of ITS development in Korea (Table 2). It articulated a bud- get for the development of the seven core ITS services over each of the three development phases through 2020, originally estimating a cost for the entire plan of 8.34 trillion Korean won ($6.67 billion).⁹⁸ These in- vestments were to be funded with contributions from the central government, local governments, and the