California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Today's transportation systems are well deployed in the developed nations, and they and their supporting activities are technologically and institutionally mature. This situation is exceptional in the perspective of the last 200 years of transportation development, during which new systems were innovated and wave after wave of construction undertaken.

An examination of the ways technologies were shaped and adopted in the past reveals that today's view of technology-based opportunities is also exceptional. Consistent with system maturity, the search for improvements is focused on marginal changes in service quality or decreases in costs. Electronics technology, for example, is being applied to smooth highway traffic, improve microwave aircraft landing systems, and tighten shippers logistics' systems. Such marginal improvements were, of course, sought in the past. The difference then was parallel interest in new system or subsystem designs. In the context of these designs, marginal changes yielded revolutionary system improvements.

The maturity of today's systems coupled with rapid expansion of technologies of possible application push and pull for increased emphasis 'on embodying technologies in new system designs.