California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

TravInfo is a regional traveler information system in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a Field Operational Test (FOT) over a two-year period from September 1996 to September 1998 with funding from the Federal Highway Administration and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). TravInfo's goal was to broadly disseminate accurate, comprehensive, timely, and reliable information on traffic conditions and multi-modal travel options to the public in the Bay Area. Organizationally, it was structured around a collaborative partnership between and among public and private participants. Operationally, the system was built on an open-architecture concept to make its regional database easily accessible to all parties interested in disseminating traveler information. TravInfo ' s operational core, the regional Traveler Information Center (TIC), collected and processed information for dissemination directly to the public and to information service providers. It was primarily a manually run operation and so depended heavily on the performance and workload of its staff. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the operation of TravInfo's Traveler Information Center with a focus on its operation by a private sector contractor. The evaluation of the operation of the Traveler Information Center was performed using various data sources from field observations and field measurements. The evaluation of the Traveler Information Center consisted of technical and institutional elements. The technical component examined system reliability, the communications interface, the operator work setting, and operator performance. The institutional analysis element examined the TIC's operational effectiveness from an organizational perspective, including the identification of both areas of achievement as well as barriers to successful TIC operations. In addition, the deployment of regional traveler information centers in other parts of the country was examined. Key Words: TravInfo, Field Operational Test, evaluation, regional traveler information centers, advanced traveler information systems