IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 16, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2015

Scanning the Issue and Beyond: Crowdsourcing for

Field Transportation Studies and Services

   Happy New Year to Everyone! This is the year of the sheep according to the Chinese lunar calendar, which implies a year of happiness in every day, almost! I wish our journal to be a better one in the year of the sheep with your help. So please check @IEEE-TITS (http://www.weibo.com/u/3967923931)  in Weibo (an extended Chinese version of Twitter), IEEE ITS Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/IEEEITS), and our Twitter account @IEEEITS (https://twitter.com/IEEEITS) for upcoming news in the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, and the IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS MAGAZINE. The three sites are still under development, and your participation and any suggestions for their operation are extremely welcome.

CALL FOR CROWDSOURCING FOR FIELD TRANSPORTATION STUDIES AND SERVICES

   Since 2012, I have tried many times to drive by myself in order to have some real field taste of Beijing’s traffic problems. Those experiences are quite useful for me, but sometimes they are also quite dangerous. One time I was horned by over a dozen angry drivers behind my car since I was still waiting anxiously for the traffic light in front of me to turn green while the tiny green light indicating to go had actually been on for almost half a minute in my far right with a distance about 30 meters away! Last summer, I almost had three accidents while try to have a feeling of crossing the city without GPS navigation from the center to Beijing’s International Conference Center in the northeast corner of Ring 5. I was confused by traffic signs along the way and was bouncing back and forth between Ring 3 and Ring 4, then Ring 5. Finally, I had to turn my GPS on just to make sure about my driving direction and call friends for road information. It took almost 5 hours to complete a trip that normally should take only 1 hour to finish, but I should feel fortunate since I was able to reach my destination before the rush hours. After this experience, I decided to pay a taxi driver and one of my students to collect the information I need for field transportation studies. So far, I have a plenty of words or complaints or suggestions to say about traffic signs, traffic equipment, and traffic fences that separate lances physically in both cities of Beijing and Qingdao (or Tsingdao) but, most of all, about people’s driving and traveling behaviors and metropolitan traffic management styles.

   However, my enthusiasm for more field transportation investigation was stopped suddenly by a conversation with my niece, who is completing her MS degree in Engineering Management. While I was telling her the traffic problems I had experienced, she said she never noticed them since she always use her smart phone for instruction, not the traffic sign on roadside. What a generation gap! I talked to my students and young colleague about this, basically they told me that I am almost “Out,” and I should use the crowdsourcing that I had championed for social computing a long time ago for field transportation field studies and services. After a few days of searching the Web, I feel strongly that we should invent and popularize more digital tools that enable citizens to exert power over institutions and decision makers for design, construction, maintainence, and management of transportation infrastructure and systems. So this is my call:

   1) We should construct platforms similar to OpenStreetMap for traffic and transportation for lowering the barriers of taking the first civil steps at scale so people can generate and see related information easily, and make them available free to all. Call them OpenTrafficMap or RealTrafficMap? Actually, Automotive Navigation Data (AND) has participated in OpenStreetMap already by donating a complete road data set for The Netherlands and trunk road data for China and India.

   2) We should establish organizations similar to MySociety for traffic and transportation for cultivating a strong accountability and a thriving civil society that are vital to mobility and impossible without engagement with government and communities. We should turn MySociety to MyTransportation, and FixMyStreet to FixMyTraffic, and so on.

   3) We should create activities similar to that of Waze to gather location data and other traffic information from volunteers for learning driving times and providing routing and realtime traffic updates. With such software, people can report accidents, traffic jams, and speed and police traps, and can update roads, landmarks, house numbers, as well as identify the cheapest fuel station nearby or along routes. Unfortunately, Google acquiredWaze last year.We need more open and free software for better traffic and good transportation.

   4) In the end, we need an open and free knowledge system for traffic and transportation, similar to Wikipedia, to host, connect, facilitate, and collect information from these platforms, organizations, and activities, where transportation knowledge automation tools or transportation knowledge robots play a critical role to make of use of those easy and efficient.

   When those platforms, organizations, activities, and knowledge systems are available, I am confident that crowdsourcing will be a normal manner of collecting traffic and transportation information, and field transportation studies and services will be in a new era.

FEI-YUE WANG, Editor-in-Chief

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/icp.jsp?arnumber=7029214 

Scanning the Issue and Beyond： Crowdsourcing for Field Transportation Studies a.pdf