Intelligent Transport Systems

I'm sitting here today in London at an event considering Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) of the future.  It's a gathering of people from organisations that work on applications and infrastructure for ITS as well as those involved in digital communications.  

Imagine a future where your car takes account of congestion, optimises for efficiency and environmental concerns, can automatically call and help locate you to the emergency or breakdown services in specific circumstances, and provides information and entertainment for the occupants.  

And then there is the ITS impact on public transport.  Maybe a future blog entry will cover this more.

Our first discussion in groups concerned the challenges of getting ITS deployed.  The consensus was clearly that the major challenges are not technical, but social, political, institutional and regulatory.   I totally agree with this notion.   There are plenty of clever engineers around to solve the technical problems.