Institutional issues to successful ITS implementation in Korea

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have developed rapidly over the last three years in Korea. This has been driven largely by rapid development of information processing, communication, and vehicle technology, combined with ever-increasing congestion on the urban streets. This is every reason to believe that ITS will be most heavily deployed in metropolitan cities of Korea, where important safety and congestion benefits. ITS is being developed as a national program to cope with diverse traffic problems in Korea. The Korea government plans to spend 1% of the total transport expenditure on research and development of ITS over the next 5 years, reaching 100-200 million US$ annually. It is suggested that the benefits of ITS systems are substantial, but that failure to address a number of important institutional issues is one major reason for failure this system to live up to expectations, at least thus far. This paper examines the institutional issues that affect the implementation of ITS in Korea. In this paper, the definition and components of ITS are explained, and the recent developments of this system are discussed. The institutional issues on ITS implementation are identified on an extensive literature review.