INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION APPLICATIONS FOR THE 2002 OLYMPICS

In 1991, the Utah State Legislature established a Transportation Management Committee (TMC) to oversee the planning for alternative methods of dealing with increased traffic. The TMC recommended that a valleywide intelligent transportation system (ITS) be developed to improve traffic flow along the existing transportation corridors. The valleywide ITS project was then included as a traffic mitigation effort in the reconstruction of Interstate 15 through the Salt Lake urbanized area. When completed in 2001, the area's ITS system, CommuterLink, will be an $80,000,000 multijurisdictional system capable of providing information and guidance to commuters using the freeway system, the highway system, and transit. In 1995, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2002 Winter Olympics to the Salt Lake Area and began major transportation planning efforts to ensure that access to all venues by the athletes, officials, Olympic family, and spectators will be accomplished in a manner that will be both efficient and convenient. It became apparent that the use of ITS tools would be valuable in the Olympic planning efforts. This paper describes the ITS applications that will be used to serve each of the Olympic venues during the games.