California System Architecture Study: Architecture for Action: A Strategy for Facilitating Near-term Deployment

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), ushered in by ISTEA in 1991 and advanced under TEA-21 in 1998, fundamentally alter transportation planning and implementation in the United States.  ITS shifts emphasis away from new construction and capacity to more efficient management of existing systems, in the process requiring increased coordination and integration of standards, systems, and policies.  The National ITS Architecture provides a framework for integration, but leaves the majority of the implementation decisions to the state, regional, and local levels.  California is well-positioned to take a leadership role in ITS implementation.  Therefore, the purpose of this report is to identify the challenges to ITS deployment in California and to offer a set of recommendations for overcoming these challenges.  The analysis is based upon an extensive literature review, interviews and focus groups conducted with over seventy-five transportation professionals from around the State, and a statewide Deployment Symposium held in September 1997.The report is organized around three layers of analysis, drawn from the National Architecture:  Standards, System Management, and Policy.  We conclude that the challenges to ITS deployment and development of the Architecture can best be overcome by first focusing on integration at the regional and local levels.  At the same time, we identify the need for a more service-oriented public sector, whose role is to provide ITS information, education and training.  We subsequently recommend a decentralized, evolutionary strategy – decentralized through an emphasis on increased regional and local authority, and evolutionary in its focus on developing the Architecture around near-term deployment – ‘Architecture for Action.