Transportation

policy factors
Policy factors appear to be much more important than non-policy factors in explaining international leader- ship in ITS. Overall, the lesson from analyzing policy factors in the countries leading ITS deployment are: Countries must have a comprehensive national vision for the promise and impact of intelligent transporta- tion systems, countries must sufficiently fund capital investments in ITS, and they must pursue a coordi- nated, focused national-level ITS implementation.


governments’ explicit recognition of the Importance of and Vision for ITs
One reason why Japan, South Korea, and Singapore lead in ITS is because these countries view ITS as one of a suite of IT applications or infrastructures that will

transform their societies and drive economic growth. As such, they have focused on establishing policies for digital transformation generally, and ITS transforma- tion specifically, and have made both a national prior- ity. As ABI Research noted, “Japan and South Korea lead the world in intelligent transportation systems, and national government agendas are among the most significant drivers for the development of ITS there.”¹⁶² In contrast, there has been no national vision for IT transformation in the United States and as such, ITS, to the extent it gets attention and funding, is seen as simply an adjunct tool that might make transporta- tion a bit better.

Japan’s seminal 2001 eJapan Strategy set a “national strategy which aimed to transform Japan into one of the most advanced nations in information technology within five years,” and explicitly “recognized a pillar of this strategy to be establishing public transport sys- tems which rely on advanced information communi- cations technologies.” In 2006, the New IT Reform Strategy updated the 2001 eJapan vision, aiming “to complete the IT reformation by 2010 before other countries and to create a society in which all people feel the benefits of IT.” The New IT Reform Strategy specifically established “Guidelines for the Informati- zation of the Road,” aiming “to make roads in Japan the safest in the world.” Figure 12 illustrates the evo- lution of Japan’s information technology competitive- ness strategy; ITS has been a core component of each milestone.