170 PART | IV ITS regulations, policies and standards
The UN-ESCAP study (United Nations ESCAP, 2015) lists some ITS appli-
cations in the Asia and Pacific region, such as:
• FASTag, the electronic toll collection system developed in India. FASTag
was implemented in 2014 in Delhi–Mumbai and until the end of 2016 has
been deployed in more than 350 points along the national highways across
the country (Omarhommadi, 2017). Of course, similar systems have been
developed in South Korea (the Hi-Pass system) and Singapore (Electronic
Road Pricing system), in many EU countries such as Italy (Telepass) and
Greece (e-pass), in Canada (Canada 407 Express) and US (E-ZPass).
• The Stochastic Cell Transmission Model jointly developed by Hong Kong
and Thailand, which provides traffic information in real-time and allows to
develop intelligent traffic management systems.
• The public transport information system of Seoul Metropolitan City, which
logs 5 million discrete events every night and combines them with Gb of
smartphone data in order to analyze and propose new bus routes and bus stop
locations.
South Korea invested almost 3.2 billion dollars on ITS in the period between
2008 and 2020 as part of the national strategy and has established four models
for controlling the vehicle emitted signals and its use in traffic management,
for collecting vehicle data and managing public transport. Finally, provides a
rechargeable smart card like a mobile app (T-money) for contactless payments
in public transport vehicles.
Japan began investing in ITS before the millennium, first in Tokyo Area and
then nationwide (Tsuzawa & Okamoto, 1989), with computer-based traffic con-
trol systems and smart traffic lights, in-vehicle navigation systems, and infor-
mation systems. This allowed Tokyo authorities to deliver accurate information
to citizens and assist them to optimize their travel time. The results of such
interventions included a major reduction in commute time and financial gains of
almost 6 times the cost of infrastructure. The country also invested in electronic
toll collection and rapid emergency and rescue activities, and now builds on
setting up a full-scale advanced ICT society that in terms of ITS will cover navi-
gation, assistance, road management, support for pedestrians and many more.
Today, Japan has a national standard for e-tolls and invests an approximate of
700 million dollars per year on ITS. The ITS-Spot data system is an interesting
vehicle–infrastructure cooperative system, based on a network of 1600 commu-
nication devices that connect vehicles with a backbone system that collects and
processes data and provides real-time traffic predictions.
In China, the automation of traffic management has been the key to improv-
ing transportation efficiency and sustainability and has attracted great attention
from the government, which puts a lot of effort and funding to ITS policies and
research. China has completed twelve 5-year plans and now implements the
thirteenth plan in the row, which aims to develop green and sustainable trans-
portation systems. Before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the “National