| Summary: | The benefits of ITS are indirectly represented by the annual world market for ITS, which
according to ITS Canada will be CDN $90 billion by 2011. Improved safety is often cited as
being the top goal of implementing ITS, followed by others relating to efficiency, economic
productivity, and the environment. However, despite the magnitude of these investments and
their underlying goal to improve transportation safety, and despite the inherent recognition of
the safety improvement potential of ITS by transportation professionals, there is a deficiency
in the quantity and quality of reported ITS safety benefits. Much of the existing evaluations
and reported benefits to date suffer from the lack of an evaluation framework and
inconsistent terminology used to attribute benefits to ITS application areas.
In light of these issues, and the ongoing need in the ITS community to better demonstrate the
safety benefits of ITS, a framework has been developed for evaluating the safety benefits of
ITS. This framework is unique in that it uses the ITS application areas defined by the market
packages in the Canadian ITS Architecture and categorizes and correlates them against a
distinct set of metrics defined to measure the safety benefits of ITS. Furthermore, the metrics
are correlated with each other to capture the "cause" and "effect" flow of benefits and how
each market packages contributes to the fundamental goal of reducing the number and
severity of crashes. The need for this approach has been illustrated through a case study that
demonstrates the potential disparity in benefit estimates when no framework is used.
This framework will benefit future evaluations of ITS safety benefits by providing a structure
for undertaking evaluations and reporting of benefits, while addressing the terminology issue
through an interface with the Canadian ITS Architecture. This framework forms the basis of
developing similar frameworks related to measuring benefits associated with other ITS goals.
Each of these individual frameworks could be linked together (via their common "cause" and
"effect" metrics to provide an overall framework for evaluating all ITS benefits. This overall
framework could be integrated with the Canadian ITS Architecture documentation and
training programs to ensure that the evaluation of ITS benefits becomes an integral part of
ITS planning and design.
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