Transportation

provision of real-Time Traffic Information to drivers One area in which the United States notably trails Ja- pan and other world leaders is in the provision of pub- licly available, real-time traffic information to citizens.
Recognizing that real-time traffic information systems, like other forms of ITS, can be used to improve traf- fic flow and congestion, Congress enacted legislation in 2005 requiring the U.S. Department of Transporta- tion to establish the Real-Time System Management Information Program, in order to provide states the capability to monitor traffic and travel conditions on major highways and share that information.¹¹⁹ To es- tablish the Program, the Federal Highway Administra- tion issued a rule proposing requirements for states to make available certain traffic information, specifically travel time, travel speed, and incident notification, on major highways, and to meet data quality standards, including standards for timeliness, accuracy, and avail- ability of that traffic information.

In November 2009, the Government Accountability Office, at the request of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, issued a report, “Efforts to Address Highway Congestion through Real-Time Traffic Information Systems are Expand- ing but Face Implementation Challenges” which, us- ing 2007 data, found shortcomings in states’ abilities to accrue and provide real-time traffic information to the public. State and local agencies distribute real-time traffic information to the public primarily through the Internet, e-mail, television and radio, dynamic mes- sage signs, Highway Advisory Radio, and a 511 Travel Information System.¹²⁰ The GAO report found that

while coverage provided by these services and tech- nologies is expanding, there are gaps in coverage and variations in aspects of real-time traffic information, such as the quality of the data collected and the extent to which state and local agencies share their data.¹²¹


Regarding the collection of real-time traffic informa- tion, the report found that technologies used by state and local agencies to do so covered only 39 percent of the combined freeway miles in 64 metropolitan areas providing information.¹²² The GAO noted that, while that percentage was up 6 percent from the 33 percent coverage available in 2004, it remained a significant gap, given that urban freeways account for the major- ity of the nation’s traffic, congestion, and travel time variability.¹²³

The picture was not much better with regard to the dis- semination of real-time travel information to the pub- lic. The GAO report found that, in 2007, the percent- age of the (94 data-providing) U.S. metropolitan areas delivering real-time highway travel time and highway travel speed information to the public was, respective- ly, 36 percent and 32 percent (Table 3).¹²⁴ The situa- tion was worse with regard to arterial roadways, for which only 16 percent of the (102 data-providing) U.S. metropolitan areas disseminate real-time travel speed information and only 19 percent distribute travel time data in real-time. The United States does do better with distributing incident information in real-time, with 87 percent of metropolitan areas distributing real-time in- formation about incidents on freeways and 68 percent sharing incident information on arterial roadways.¹²⁵

With regard to the 511 Traveler Information Service, which provides a three-digit telephone number that travelers can call via telephone (using an interactive voice response automated system) to obtain various types of travel information, including information on