Connected vehicles have the potential to transform travel as we know it by combining leading edge technologies— advanced wireless communications, on-board computer processing, advanced vehicle-sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, smart infrastructure, and others—to address safety, mobility, and environmental challenges. Over the last five years, application prototyping and assessment has been a focus of federal connected vehicle research and development activity, resulting in more than three dozen connected vehicle application concepts. This effort also included assessments to measure safety, mobility and environmental impacts from four U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) connected vehicle Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) research programs (V2I Safety, Dynamic Mobility Applications (DMA), Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis (AERIS), and Road-Weather Management). Considering results to date from these assessment activities, there is a clear demonstrated potential for significant safety, mobility and environmental impacts from V2I connected vehicle applications: (1) Combinations of V2I connected vehicle applications are effective in signalized networks, particularly in prioritizing signal timing and reducing overall delay (up to 27%), carbon dioxide emissions and fuel consumption (up to 11%). Intersection-focused safety applications may potentially address up to 575,000 crashes and 5,100 fatalities per year. (2) V2I connected vehicle applications add a potentially new capability to flow management in congested freeway segments, particularly in the mitigation of potentially unsafe speed differentials in advance of bottleneck locations, reducing fuel consumption (up to 4.5%), or in the reduction of delay generated by major incidents (up to 14%). A curve speed warning safety application may potentially address up to 169,000 crashes and 5,000 fatal crashes per year. (3) The magnitude of benefits of many applications are highly dependent on the level of technology deployment at the roadside, in vehicles, or within mobile devices. However, applications targeting fleet vehicles may be early winners – as well as applications that serve to prioritize or facilitate facility access.

Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) identifies Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) as part of the solution to the Nation’s transportation needs and provides mechanisms for accelerating deployment of innovative technology. The legislation contains a provision directing the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to: “encourage deployment of ITS to improve the performance of the National Highway System (NHS) in areas such as: traffic operations, emergency response, incident management, surface transportation network management, freight management, traffic flow information and congestion management by accelerating adoption of innovative technologies through the use of: demonstration programs, grant funding, incentives to eligible entities, and other tools/strategies or methods that will result in the deployment of innovative ITS technologies.” Further, the Secretary is directed to prepare a plan that addresses the manner in which incentives may be adopted, as appropriate, through existing deployment activities carried out by surface transportation modal administrations. This report addresses these requirements. It provides insights based on past and present experience with incentive programs and provides analysis and findings on appropriate incentives that the United States Department of Transportation (Department) has adopted, or is considering for adoption. The report was prepared through a collaborative process within and outside of the Department, and managed by an advisory team consisting of representatives of the surface transportation modal administrations.

The Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Joint Program Office (JPO) is placing increasing emphasis on transferring ITS technology from research to deployment, and on accelerating the rate of ITS technology adoption. As part of these efforts, the JPO has sponsored research studies intended to improve the state of knowledge regarding the underlying characteristics and factors for technology adoption and deployment. This report is the final deliverable from the most recent of these studies, the Longitudinal Study of Implementation: Decision Factors and Effects (started in January 2012). This final report documents the findings and key observations from all tasks of the Longitudinal Study of Implementation. The Longitudinal Study of Implementation builds upon a body of existing work related to decision factors influencing ITS adoption, growth, maintenance or decline within the public and private sectors. The Longitudinal Study uses an interview-based approach to further analyze decision factors among public sector transportation agencies and the trucking industry; interviews with connected vehicle technology representatives from the automotive industry to assess their perspectives on what is needed for the connected vehicle environment to be fully realized; a post-hoc set of studies reviewing deployments, costs, and benefits at early ITS deployment sites; and a workshop and analysis of how to present cost and benefit information in a way that best informs and influences decision-makers. Finally, based on a cross-cutting assessment of these findings, the study team suggests several major themes for the federal government to consider regarding next generation ITS and the connected vehicle environment. Results indicate that for the public sector, the most important technology and application factor was quality and reliability, followed by interoperability considerations and demonstration of benefits. The most important external factor was budget and funding sources. For the trucking industry, the most important factors for adopting a new technology were the price/ Return-on-Investment (ROI), compatibility with existing systems, readiness and maturity of the technology, quality and reliability, and product service and support.

The U.S. ITS Joint Program Office ITS Costs Database (http://www.itscosts.its.dot.gov ) provides both unit costs (Capital, Operations and Maintenance (O&M), and Lifetime) for individual ITS components, and system cost examples of different Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) system deployments. Since its initial creation in 1999, the ITS Costs Database has continued to evolve in response to user feedback and advances in ITS technologies and applications. This paper provides a brief background of the ITS Costs Database. It then describes the enhancements and features recently implemented as part of the 2010 review and update of the cost structure and content. These include providing the ability to view ITS Sample Unit Cost Entries of specific ITS cost components from bid tabs and other sources and incorporating “Other System Wide” and “Non-ITS” costs to begin to bridge the gap between unit and system costs. Last, next steps and potential future enhancements are briefly discussed.

The purpose of this report is to provide a summary and back-up information on the methodology, data sources, and results for the estimate of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) capital expenditures in the top 75 metropolitan areas as of FY 2010. It is the 7th in a series of estimates that are derived from an initial forecast of the full deployment cost for ITS in Metropolitan areas across the United States, and subsequent ITS Deployment Survey results. From 1997 to 2010 the ITS deployment among the 75 largest metropolitan areas has increased 185% or $12 billion from $6.5 billion to $18.5 billion (and $3 billion since 2005). This highlights the significant and steady growth in ITS expenditures that has occurred since the first ITS deployment survey was conducted in 1997. The deployments made through 2010 represent 41.9% of the estimated total costs for full ITS deployment in these areas. In other words, the average market penetration of deployed ITS is about 42% in the typical large metropolitan area of the United States. From 2005 through 2010 roughly $600 million per year was invested on average by the largest 75 metropolitan areas. On average this equates to about $8.0 million per year per large metropolitan area without any special deployment program. This includes investments from all sources including federal, state, local and private funding. Note, this work provides a conservative estimate of the ITS deployment since it does not include ITS investments in small and medium urban or rural areas. Nor does it capture reinvestment and the evolution of ITS systems to the next generation of technologies once the initial deployment has been made.

More and more, transportation system operators are seeing the benefits of strengthening links between planning and operations. A critical element in improving transportation decision-making and the effectiveness of transportation systems related to operations and planning is through the use of analysis tools and methods. This brochure is one in a series of five intended to improve the way existing analysis tools are used to advance operational strategies in the planning process. The specific objective of developing this informational brochure series was to provide reference and resource materials that will help planners and operations professionals to use existing transportation planning and operations analysis tools and methods in a more systematic way to better analyze, evaluate, and report the benefits of needed investments in transportation operations. This particular case study focused on compiling information on various operations strategies in order to promote a greater understanding of the impacts including: (1) High-level summaries of the likely impacts of operational strategies on performance measures; (2) Guidance on specific thresholds or rules-of-thumb that have been developed to help practitioners identify conditions that warrant deployment of particular operations strategies. The guidance provided in this case study is intended to bridge a common knowledge gap faced by many deploying agencies and aims to answer the questions: “what situations are most conducive to operational strategy deployments” and “what are the likely impacts of the strategies under consideration.”

The goals of this study were to develop a methodology for incorporating Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) into the transportation planning process and apply the methodology to estimate ITS costs and benefits for one case study. A major result from the study included the development of an analysis method for quantitatively assessing ITS impacts, called the Process for Regional Understanding and EValuation of Integrated ITS Networks (PRUEVIIN). Other significant results include the assessment of benefits from an integrated set of ITS services at the regional and corridor level, and lessons learned about incorporating ITS into the planning process. The following sections set the context for and provide a summary discussion of these findings.

This paper presents results from the assessment of alternatives as part of an effort to develop and apply techniques for incorporating intelligent transportation systems (ITS) into the transportation planning process. The paper provides a description of the alternatives, the analysis methodology, and the representative-day scenarios, followed by results from a comparison of two alternatives. The objective of the study was to develop an analysis framework that can be used for the assessment of ITS options as part of a Major Investment Study (MIS). Various alternatives were defined to alleviate congestion in a major transportation corridor. These included traditional transportation construction projects with and without ITS enhancements. The ITS services were analyzed as an integrated package and included advanced traffic management systems (ATMS), advanced transit management systems, incident and emergency management systems, as well as advanced traveler information services (ATIS). The methodology developed includes the merging of a traditional transportation planning model (EMME/2) with a large-scale transportation network simulation model (INTEGRATION). Techniques were also developed to define and capture the inter-day and annual variability of traffic conditions, and to assess the set of ITS services under these conditions.