Overview
The rapid advancement and proliferation of technology continues to present TMC operators with both great challenges and great opportunities. Already, most TMCs have developed from primarily having a monitoring role into one requiring much more decision-making and proactive control, often involving multiple agencies and jurisdictions. While this has yielded significant benefits, the expectations of the public and of the funding agencies are only expected to increase while at the same time vehicle miles traveled will increase without significant physical capacity increases and funding for transportation will stagnate or decline. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are increasingly being tapped as cost-effective strategies. Diminishing resources will be monitored carefully so performance measurement will be a critical component in justifying effective TMC operations programs.
The context of this report is the many larger societal and technological trends that have implications to TMC operations, oftentimes driving the ITS trends and strategies described in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. These big picture influencers are described in Chapter 2.