Transportation GIS use is growing from primarily planning-only systems to integrated operations support systems. In part from the creation of detailed inventories of transportation infrastructure used for planning, design support, and investment analysis, a myriad of operational support systems have sprung forth. Both public transportation agencies and private fleet managers are making investments that result in greater safety and efficiency. From transit operators tracking buses and trains to trucking companies dispatching pickups and deliveries, the benefits of GIS use have blossomed across the world in essentially every mode of the vast transportation system.

The potential for both investment return and broad societal gain via the use of GIS in transportation operations is enormous. The example of routing efficiencies providing direct benefit to both the fleet manager and customer has been echoed in hundreds of fleets, both within and outside the transportation industry. There are a few key technical trends that are making benefits easier to attain for today's fleet manager, which were not so readily attainable even five years ago. First, worldwide commercial street databases have grown remarkably in quality and become cheaper to acquire by individual organizations. Second, the growth in the so-called "Intelligent Transportation Systems" technologies has made timely data more available about traffic congestion, weather, and emergency and service vehicle location as well as both planned events and unplanned incidents. Third, the ability to communicate this data to all the key stakeholders across divisions and agencies through loosely coupled systems with common data models has allowed a higher level of coordination.

In the coming year, GIS systems designers and analysts will be able to enable their agencies and firms to model transportation movements multimodally. Soon analysts will also be able to model the movement of a passenger across transportation modes (e.g., from bus to rail and back to bus) or model the movement of freight containers from sea to rail to truck. This key advancement will enable another wave of benefits to the users of GIS.

For more information, visit www.esri.com/transportation on the Web.