The current trends and issues on ITS in Japan: Safety, energy and environment

Japan has been conducting ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) projects since mid 1980s aiming at safety and less congestion of road transportation. The car navigation systems, driver information systems, and ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) are already widespread, and large scale experiments on cooperative systems with road-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-vehicle communications for safety were conducted for near future introduction. The communication technologies are based on 5.8 GHz DSRC. In addition in a project aiming at energy saving and CO2 emission reduction, an automated truck platoon has been developed. One of the issues is low penetration of the safety-related systems.