THE CONTRIBUTION OF MUNICH'S COOPERATIVE TRANSPORT MANAGEMENT TO INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEMS

The Munich project of Cooperative Management for Urban and Regional Transport is a public-private partnership to develop, validate, and implement intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in the Munich Greater Area. The objective of the Munich-COMFORT project is to demonstrate the potentials of transport telematics in the context of the European research and development programs DRIVE and advanced transport telematics (ATT) as a contribution to the city's and region's transport policies and systems. Three areas of the recent developments of ITS are reported in this paper. First, the experience is reported that was gained by integrating telematics systems as operational tools into the urban and regional transport context. This activity resulted in institutional innovations to cope with the interfaces between urban and regional transport to promote a modal shift to public transport, such as park and ride systems. The second area of the project is the recent technological innovations implemented and demonstrated in several applications in Munich, such as public transport information and management, advanced urban and regional traffic control, with public transport priority in-vehicle and information systems. In the field trials the technical reliability as well as the traffic control strategies were investigated as part of the installation of a strategy and service center based on a generic traffic information pool. The third area covers the modeling tools developed in the project to assess the impacts of the demonstrated transport telematic systems. Emphasis is given on the results of the technical and operational assessment as well as on a cooperative effort to analyze the project achievements in the context of European research and development programs. The last section of the paper presents some vision of future ITS based on the Munich experience.