Jason Barnes, Editor of ITS International
At risk of being accused of going on like a broken record (and, perhaps, mystifying those readers of the post-vinyl generation with my choice of expression), I want to come back to... well, everything but the technology.
Contemplating developments over the last decade and more, it's clear that the ITS industry (and, by proxy, transport and travel management) have made huge technological strides. It's also learned what many of us do by middle age: that life never quite turns out like you expected.
Some very promising technologies have failed to realise their full potential; others have literally been left stuck on the hard shoulder whilst others still have sped past in the fast lane.
Policies have evolved - we've seen the environment rise to stand side-by-side with safety, once the singularly most important flower in the garden. Efforts to improve international cooperation and standardisation churn on, and no doubt will continue to do so as new regions and technologies come on board (or, as is more likely in the case of the latter, head offboard).
Everything's just sweet and dandy.
This magazine will present at this year's6456 ITS World Congress in Orlando, where we'll witness - once again - demonstrations which prove that vehicle can talk to infrastructure can talk to vehicle. What's missing is the funding to allow such systems to be rolled out across nations from - oh, let's say 9am next Monday morning. What's not missing is the technology, in abundance, to do all this.
The original concepts of cooperative infrastructure, with microwave roadside beacons every few hundred metres along every road in the world, now seem quaint and clumsy alongside the pared-down, more mobile solutions currently favoured.
But that's progress... and I've just spent the last 300 words talking about technology when I promised that I wouldn't.
No, I'm done with technology. It works - however we decide to go forward, there are little bits of hardware and software genius out there lurking, just waiting to transform my life.
The thing that continues to vex me most is privacy. It's the one area where we've signally failed to make meaningful progress. Which is shameful; no-one with any working knowledge of ITS can reasonably claim ignorance of the issue.
Plenty can step forward and claim a prize for willfully ignoring it or trusting to fate and the gods that, somehow, things will all sort out for themselves.
As CVTA President Scott McCormick points out on pp.59-60 of this edition, true privacy doesn't exist; we can mask identities but they'll always be accessible somehow.1692 TomTom's Nick Cohn and 163 Inrix's Ted Trepanier make some interesting comparisons between how privacy is handled in the public and private sectors on pp.62-65 and I have to agree with their assertions that the ongoing public perception is that the public sector is clumsy and careless when it comes to handling individuals' personal data.
Whether the injection of a commercial imperative or greater sanction would change that, I truly don't know. I do know that the other prevailing opinion, that the state is somehow malevolent, is nonsense.
All of the traffic engineers I've ever met are (in their professional lives at least) concerned only with making our transport networks work better. When it comes to individuals' personal affairs (and I use that word deliberately, in all its forms), they're occasionally negligent but pretty much ambivalent. Yet we continue to let single issue pressure groups hold sway.
The truth is that it's perfectly possible to put in place sufficient checks and balances such that no-one in officialdom would dare to abuse a person's right to privacy. It's never been any more or less true that if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to fear. So it's time for our elected officials to take a much more robust line on this. And it's time for a great many of us to get over the idea that we're anywhere near as interesting as we think we are.
Contemplating developments over the last decade and more, it's clear that the ITS industry (and, by proxy, transport and travel management) have made huge technological strides. It's also learned what many of us do by middle age: that life never quite turns out like you expected.
Some very promising technologies have failed to realise their full potential; others have literally been left stuck on the hard shoulder whilst others still have sped past in the fast lane.
Policies have evolved - we've seen the environment rise to stand side-by-side with safety, once the singularly most important flower in the garden. Efforts to improve international cooperation and standardisation churn on, and no doubt will continue to do so as new regions and technologies come on board (or, as is more likely in the case of the latter, head offboard).
Everything's just sweet and dandy.
This magazine will present at this year's
The original concepts of cooperative infrastructure, with microwave roadside beacons every few hundred metres along every road in the world, now seem quaint and clumsy alongside the pared-down, more mobile solutions currently favoured.
But that's progress... and I've just spent the last 300 words talking about technology when I promised that I wouldn't.
No, I'm done with technology. It works - however we decide to go forward, there are little bits of hardware and software genius out there lurking, just waiting to transform my life.
The thing that continues to vex me most is privacy. It's the one area where we've signally failed to make meaningful progress. Which is shameful; no-one with any working knowledge of ITS can reasonably claim ignorance of the issue.
Plenty can step forward and claim a prize for willfully ignoring it or trusting to fate and the gods that, somehow, things will all sort out for themselves.
As CVTA President Scott McCormick points out on pp.59-60 of this edition, true privacy doesn't exist; we can mask identities but they'll always be accessible somehow.
Whether the injection of a commercial imperative or greater sanction would change that, I truly don't know. I do know that the other prevailing opinion, that the state is somehow malevolent, is nonsense.
All of the traffic engineers I've ever met are (in their professional lives at least) concerned only with making our transport networks work better. When it comes to individuals' personal affairs (and I use that word deliberately, in all its forms), they're occasionally negligent but pretty much ambivalent. Yet we continue to let single issue pressure groups hold sway.
The truth is that it's perfectly possible to put in place sufficient checks and balances such that no-one in officialdom would dare to abuse a person's right to privacy. It's never been any more or less true that if you've done nothing wrong you've nothing to fear. So it's time for our elected officials to take a much more robust line on this. And it's time for a great many of us to get over the idea that we're anywhere near as interesting as we think we are.
