Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

The rapidly growing traffic congestion, as well as the increasing complexity of trip making in contemporary metropolitan areas, has encouraged the systematic adoption of advanced virtual technologies for transmitting (real-time) geospatial travel information to transport network users.The fast development, adoption, and social diffusion of virtual technologies, such as those of Internet services through the World Wide Web, in conjunction with the decreasing costs of computational power, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth, have significantly improved the amount and quality of information provided to the users. The practical deployment of such information systems is important for approximating the optimal (user equilibrium) network traffic conditions, which are underlined by the assumption of perfect information and imply the equalization of travel times among all used paths between a given origin-destination pair (Wardrop 1952).Virtual technologies, especially those based on Internet services, possess unique features for transmitting and displaying travel information through maps (and, possibly, other media) with low-cost, one-to-many communication and less location-dependent communication media, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and third-generation (3G) cell phones, in real-time conditions (Wang & Yang 1999).Nowadays, there are several Internet map-based ... log in or subscribe to read full text