Beyond sharing: cultivating cooperative transportation systems through geographic information science

Transportation systems are facing unprecedented challenges in the 21st century. Increasing the efficiency of transportation systems alone will not solve these problems and may exacerbate them. Instead, we must extract new transportation capabilities related to more cooperative decision-making across a wide range of time horizons, spatial scales and decision contexts. This paper discusses the role of sensed transportation, geographic information science and social media to cultivate transportation systems where participants share, cooperate and act collectively to solve operational, tactical and strategic mobility and accessibility problems. This paper also provides a vision of the future by imaging a seamless multi-modal transportation system combined with a virtual environment where data streams are fused, interpreted and made available with tools for human engagement and shared decision making. This paper concludes by outlining a GIScience-centric research agenda. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.