The technology furnishes travelers and transportation managers with more and better travel information, says Michael Meyer, director of Georgia Tech's Transportation Research and Education Center. In addition, monitoring and control technologies will allow metropolitan-level responses to disruptions in traffic flow. Americans own about 135 million cars. The solution is not more roads, says Lowell Evjen of the Georgia Tech Research Institute. We've got to make the lanes we have more efficient.
Transportation is an expanding marketplace, and new money is coming on the table.
Much of the money would be supplied by taxes on motor-vehicle fuels. The funding will meet a longstanding need, Meyer says. The bill includes money for Georgia to develop transportation improvements related to the Olympics as well as intelligent-vehicle projects, Meyer says. At least 80 Georgia Tech faculty and research staff from varied disciplines have become associated with the Transportation Research and Education Center, formed in April 1991 and already one of the largest such centers in the country. The center would dispatch the information to motorists to help them plan their routes.