A Holistic Approach to the Development of ITS in Transportation Planning

Development and implementation of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires a new approach to transportation planning. The traditional approach to transportation planning included solutions related to construction of capital transport infrastructure facilities and traffic demand forecasting for a longer period. Traffic problems cannot be solved only by adding new transport network capacities. This requires finding new solutions that include improvement of traffic operations supported by ITS systems. The development of ITS is a long-term process whose development framework is defined by ITS architecture. For successful development of ITS is necessary to integrate the ITS system in the transportation planning process. A new approach to transportation planning enables finding solutions that include traffic operations management supported by ITS system in combination with the capital investments in the transportation infrastructure. The traditional approach to transportation planning started by identifying problems and ended in the proposal of resolving the problem. Unlike the traditional approach, the new approach to transportation planning includes short-term and long-term solutions that involve multiple steps of the planning process that follows the system performance measurement. The planning process is a continuous process that includes periodic evaluation of proposed solutions. This approach to transportation planning provides the ability to examine the effects of the proposed solutions to improve traffic operations supported by ITS services. ITS system allows continuous monitoring of the performance parameters of the transportation system to help decision-makers in the planning process to better understand the problems and better analyze the possible effects of different solutions supported by ITS systems.