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https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27432/critical-issues-in-transportation-for-2024-and-beyond

User driven product development of traffic information services

Liikenteen tietopalvelujen kayttajakeskeinen tuotekehitys

A key question for the mobile road condition service, described in this report was the long history of Finnish Road Enterprise in utilising IT-technology and especially the mobile technology. This way the IT-architecture and the in-house knowledge made it possible to create pilot services without huge investments. On the other hand the research pointed out that an IT-architecture, which is planned for operational use is not directly well suited for service development. A central deficiency are the support and maintenance services, which usually are in use during normal office time. An additional problem is security, which shields both the data and the IT-systems from the outside world. High data security make it difficult to produce services, while services require functioning and fast communication outside the organisation. The service users valued the personal nature of the mobile road condition service, while the information is made available in their own mobile phone and for their personal route. The main motivation for using the service according to the use cases were firstly the increased convenience and secondly the increased safety. The service were used to predict travel times and to reserve enough time. The use case was spontaneous, but intentional. The user volume of the service were very much dependent on the radio advertisements. The price of the service (0.84 Euro) was considered too high. The earning logic for the mobile services is still under development. Currently the model is mainly transaction based. This report focused on the investment in one service, the mobile road condition and the possibilities for utilising technology developed for the same in business. Services planned for people on the move are so called utility services, which require both initial investment and on-going maintenance. Both the FITS- and the preceding TETRA-programs had a common goal to create services for people on move. The private sector has not started to produce such services. One reason for this is the risk of competition from the public sector. On the other hand it is still not possible to create commercial services based on public data. The report presents an alternative, where the public body would speed up the creation of services by supporting the their end user price. The investment calculations for mobile services show that any support would best be directed to the end user price rather than to any technical platforms. This way the creation of services most useful to the consumers can be ascertained. When support is directed to the price it also motivates the service producer to produce better services, while the service will be profitable with 30% higher development costs. This report is available at http://www.vtt.fi/rte/projects/fits/ or http://www.mintc.fi

Language

  • Finnish

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Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01015288
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Source Agency: TRL
  • ISBN: 951-723-885-1
  • Files: ITRD
  • Created Date: Jan 12 2006 8:56AM