Historical Analysis of the ITS Progress of Japan

Although road traffic has supported high economic growth after the war, it has also caused serious social problems about traffic accidents, traffic congestion, and environmental pollution. Information and communication technology (ICT), such as computers, mobile communications, and digital information processing, has made rapid progress, in the second half of the 20th century. Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), which were developed using ICT, has contributed to improvement of road traffic problems, in recent years. Many ITS related people in the government, universities, and private companies and so on, have built the history of the ITS progress, making efforts and ingenuity to improve road traffic problems by ITS. In this paper we contribute improvement of road traffic problems, by clarifying the influential factors and the strong points of ITS of Japan through analyzing the history of the ITS progress of Japan.