The UK demonstration of TMC - the final results and update on progress

The Radio Data System - Traffic Message Channel was researched in the early 1990's, developed and trialled in the mid 1990's and was seen by many countries and the European Commission as the most likely telematics application from the 2nd and 3rd Framework Programmes (DRIVE1 and DRIVE2) to be introduced. Despite many promises, Council of Ministers' resolutions and good intentions, RDS-TMC was slow to be introduced across Europe. It is the authors' opinion that this was due to the dearth of suitable receivers, which firstly stemmed from the lack of technology, but more importantly from a lack of business cases for the introduction and sustainability of services. In 1995 the situation in the UK was similar to the rest of western Europe, but unlike other Member States who decided to introduce publicly funded services, the UK made the decision to bring together a public:private partnership to investigate the business cases for such services. This paper briefly describes TMC, details the demonstration and then goes on to highlight the main research findings. At the time of writing of this paper (November 2001), commercial services with sustainable business cases are being developed and launched. It should be possible to reveal more details of their constitution and success at the time of delivery of this paper at the end of March 2002.