Assessment of a Frozen Road Surface Information System by Public Demonstration

To promote traffic safety in the winter season, a frozen road surface information system distributed over the Internet using road information collected by taxi drivers was demonstrated in the field of Morioka City, Japan, in the winter of 2004 to 2005. The principle advantages of this system are the low costs relative utility of the system. Users indicated the usefulness of the system. However, applicability of the system was limited by the irregularity of road condition reports, which illustrated the importance of increasing the frequency and number of input sources.