How long before predictive travel information systems are a realistic proposition

The possibility of predicting journey times on the highway network was a main topic at a Polis workshop in Brussels, Belgium. Surrey County Council's head of transportation highlighted the lack of suitable systems. LogicaCMG is part of a Dutch consortium that has developed a suite of mobile traffic services that uses the movement of Vodaphone mobile phones to calculate real-time travel times. Surrey County Council, UK, has plans to offer drivers in the county accurate real-time information on the current state of the road network, based on a software system called WEBCOMIS. The question of whether the needs of the network managers or those of the public should take precedence was a subject for debate at the workshop. Motorway On-Line Advisor (MOLA) software, developed by TRL, is a tool aimed at motorway and trunk road control that has potential for scaling to other types of road networks. It can display live and predictive traffic data on a map of the network and can predict journey times between all nodes of the modelled network up to one hour in the future.