Margaret M. Cusack Knihy

The book explores the intersection of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), emphasizing their potential to enhance traveler information and decision-making. It highlights how historical and real-time data can improve transportation choices, alleviate congestion, and create valuable datasets often overlooked by analysts. By proposing a prototype that utilizes GIS for better data analysis and retrieval, the work aims to address challenges in the transportation sector and promote the effective use of archived ITS data globally.

Knowledge and information are the basis of informed travel behavior. Individual choice in transportation decision-making is improved by the availability and robustness of traveler information. Historical information combined with new information contributes to the individual decision maker's mode, route, and travel time choices. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) improve the information available to travelers which in turn, can alleviate recurring capacity problems and incident related capacity overloads on roadways, transit systems, at airports and ports, by disseminating better information to travelers. While generating data to send out to travelers in real time, ITS also creates valuable data in non-homogenous archive systems. This rich data source often goes unused, and is not typically accessed by analysts. This book suggests that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the perfect environment in which to convert ITS generated and archived data into a homogenous source for robust analysis. This work describes a prototype to exploit GIS and data collection technologies, using sound systems engineering principles, to address a transportation industry problem. The prototype shows how ITS data archiving and retrieval problems are opportunities for data analysis and decision-making. This work will aid in the development of archived ITS data analysis around the world.