Merging the Best of Two Worlds - ITS Toolkits: Status Quo and Road Map

More information is always better, isn’t it? This also holds true for the number of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) evaluation reports made available for the purpose of guiding and educating prospects and deployment agencies. Europe has started to build its own ITS toolkit. The question arises whether and how European ITS information should be made available to deployment authorities in the US? A similar and related question is whether and how the existing data from the US should be made available to European users? But it all is not only about more information. Impact from making best practices visible on both sides of the Atlantic has the potential to trigger a whole bundle of indirect side effects: •Knowledge spill-over to educate the next generation of ITS evaluation experts by giving them easy access to evaluation reports as well as the methodology beyond. •Cross-fertilisation in terms of making visible study designs and rather specific queries for the so called “needle in the haystack”. •A feedback loop from ITS evaluation back onto ITS project design for deployment projects. This feedback loop will as well support the design for test series of close to market studies and tests, e.g. field operational tests. •Increased visibility has additionally the potential to trigger yet unknown quality control mechanisms by means of social control. The same wording has been used to describe the phenomenon of “Wikinomics”. The European project team of the European ITS toolkit (www.2decide.eu) maintains to go significantly beyond the traditional approaches. Most information will be available in a structured format even when the European bottom-up practice has not yet established a standard format for ITS evaluation studies. This paper elaborates on the currently emerging European ITS toolkit and starts a process of exploring bottom-line benefits from joining forces. It goes without saying that research cultures differ on both sides of the Atlantic; it is also a fact that the US toolkit has been up and running for 14 years while the European toolkit will only be available in late 2011. It remains to be seen how public authorities and decision makers on ITS deployment are being impacted. However it all comes down to the question of how a community of practice on commissioning and authoring ITS evaluation studies will immediately benefit from making good practice available on both sides of the Atlantic.