Reducing VMTs through Transit-on-Demand with GPS and Satellite Communications

As a partial solution to the problem of increasing foreign petroleum imports, urban congestion, and air pollution from personal automobiles, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, have successfully demonstrated a transportation concept called Transit-On-Demand (TOD). TOD uses the global positioning system (GPS) to locate all vehicles in a fleet, two-way communications between the vehicles and a central computer-server, and advanced dispatching and routing software to control the movement of vehicles within the fleet. Through development of an advanced world wide web site and use of the new Java Internet programming language, the demonstration allows visitors to the web site to see updates of vehicle position on a map every 20 seconds, while effectively minimizing the Internet bandwidth required for this activity. The project demonstrates how a fixed-route, fixed-schedule shuttle can be converted to be demand-responsive to more effectively move people from where they are to where they want to be at the time they want to travel.