Transportation

figure 13: Investment in ITs as a share of gdp amongst selected Countries¹⁷⁸

in the development process through the “VICS Pro- motion Council,” formed in September 1991. The essential point is that in designing the VICS system, Japan’s government partnered with its private sector to understand how commercially viable business mod- els for value-added ITS services could be built off the VICS platform.

The ability to forge successful public-private partner- ships (PPPs) has been a key differentiator for Japan and South Korea’s leadership in intelligent transportation systems. The United States has found it more difficult to forge public-private partnerships in intelligent trans- portation systems, for many reasons, including legal, institutional, political, and leadership hurdles. Insuffi- cient guidelines exist to guide development of public- private partnerships of ITS in the United States, and several of the failed experiences to date risk tarnish- ing perspectives towards PPPs. The contrast between Japan’s and South Korea’s, as compared to the United States’, efforts to forge public-private partnerships in the collection and dissemination of real-time traffic in- formation, as documented earlier, could not be more stark.

Whatever the reason, it appears clear that leading coun- tries, including Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, have demonstrated superior ability than the United States to forge ITS-related public-private partnerships. Testaments to this include VICS and Smartway in Ja- pan and South Korea’s close cooperation with the Ko- rea Expressway Corporation on the implementation of

intelligent transportation systems and the provision of real-time traffic information. In Singapore, the Land Transport Authority partnered with privately-owned taxis to turn them into probe vehicles. Part of the na- tional leadership vision for ITS in the United States should be to not only lead the states and regions, but also the private sector, in the development of intelligent transportation systems.