An article in the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper notes that traffic jams in Canada's nine largest cities are estimated to "[cost] the economy as much as $3.7-billion a year in delays, wasted fuel and greenhouse gas emissions."
Now, that's a lot of money, but consider that, as of the most recent census (2001), combined population of Canada's nine largest cities comes out to 8,722,246 - or, a bit more than the population of New York City (8,085,742). [The largest city in Canada had a population of 2,481,494; the ninth-largest (Quebec City) had a population of 507,986. That would make Quebec City the 32nd largest city in the US (based on 2003 population figures), after Tucson, AZ.]
In other words, assuming that Canadians and Americans have similar habits, if Canada is losing $3.7B a year in traffic jams, NYC alone is losing about as much (indeed, having spent considerable time in NYC and in Canada's three largest cities, I'd bet the Big Apple loses twice as much). The amount the US as a whole must be losing each year boggles the mind - enough to buy Google Corp and have some cash left over for frappucinos.
I think these numbers underscore the importance of the ITS industry's efforts. Incremental benefits from ITS can save huge dollars, not to mention the reduction in stress and frustration for individuals.

Autoweek has a good article about the gee-whizery of telematics. They note the prototypes floating around and note some of the obvious problems for large-scale implementation.

TheNewspaper.com reports on a study in Virginia illustrating the need for proper siting of field equipment, in this case video detection. The study found that cameras were not set up properly to avoid predictable seasonal direct sunlight hits or reduce occlusion. Like most systems, however, loops were in the roadway and provided supporting data.

Having seen this many times with all types of light sensitive detection, including Opticom, perhaps systems should assume a one year adjustment period. The Senator referred to this as "working the kinks out." I'm not sure the problem is with the technology, but merely adapting to changing or unique roadway conditions.

Anyone in ITS can tell you that comm to field devices remains the most problematic part of any solution. Various systems related to field devices in very different ways. Slowly, vendors are retooling systems to have IP accessible devices network wide.

Even on dial-up, this is a tremendous advantage.

This week VBrick and Broadcomm announced a partnership to extend their selection of IP configurable and (moderately) low-bandwidth devices.

Now if we could just find that muni-wifi silver bullet...

There is something going on and people playing in the telematics field should take notice. Over the last several months, I've received about a dozen inquiries from headhunters looking for development managers, architects, and visionaries in telematics.

The firms they are searching for are not currently players in the telematics field - or not serious players at any rate.

To me, unless you have a seriously new innovation in mind, the telematics train is a crowded one with no driver. There are a lot of people clammoring to get products noticed, but few have a real differentiator.

Everyone wants to get real time information to the vehicle - but we've been doing that for over a decade now. Communications are becoming more ubiquitous, but as they do the need for real-time data telematics actually decreases.

I've been advising these companies to have some grasp of what they might want to build before creating a telematics group out of whole cloth. One of the things that I liked about Circumnav is that Steve Wollenberg has built the company around a very tight business model. Steve's been in telematics about as long as anyone and has watched many enter the market and fail.

He understands, I believe, that this will be a transient market with a very short monetization window.

The technologies behind telematics (communication, visualization, speech recognition) are changing rapidly. With Web 2.0 on a concurrent development path and muni wifi right on their tails, in-vehicle devices will become rapidly obsolete.

This is the major challenge of telematics. How many pieces of computer have you had as long as you've had your car?

Automobiles are a long term durable good into which telematics aims to put a short term durable good. At Infomove, they understood this and based their telematics solution on a PDA running Windows CE. That, in my mind, was the correct concept. You want something that will support maximum customization and a clear and painless upgrade path.

There are exceptions to this -- emergency or non-repeating services. On-Star wanted to be everything. It wanted to book you concert tickets and make hotel reservations. Feature bloat. On-Star's killer app is its one-touch emergency services and systems diagnostics model.

That type of system is appropriate to be hardwired to the vehicle so (a) the user doesn't screw it up and (b) it's always obvious how to use it. Cellular phone technology and GPS are fairly solid technologies. There's no need to swap them out or upgrade.

Collision avoidance and lane drift warning systems are also highly appropriate as hard wired systems. ITS World Congress '06 featured some collision avoidance systems that, while not ready for prime time, were quite compelling. Iteris' lane drift system is in production Infinity 06 models.

It's clear that there are different strata of telematics devices and many companies don't see the division. Some spokespeople from Detroit I talked to recently lumped DVD players into their definition of telematics. I urge them to examine the tech they are putting in their vehicles and ask ... what is the lifespan of this device compared to the lifespan of the vehicle?