Integrated Intermodal Passenger Transportation System

Modern transportation consists of many unique modes of travel. Each of these modes and their respective industries has evolved independently over time, forming a largely incoherent and inefficient overall transportation system. Travelers today are forced to spend unnecessary time and efforts planning a trip through varying modes of travel each with their own scheduling, pricing, and services; causing many travelers to simply rely on their relatively inefficient and expensive personal automobile. This paper presents a demonstration program system to not only collect and format many different sources of trip planning information, but also combine these independent modes of travel in order to form optimal routes and itineraries of travel. The results of this system show a mean decrease in inter-city travel time of 10 percent and a 25 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions over personal automobiles. Additionally, a 55 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions is observed for intra-city travel. A conclusion is that current resources are available, if somewhat hidden, to drastically improve point to point transportation in terms of time spent traveling, the cost of travel, and the ecological impact of a trip. Finally, future concepts are considered which could dramatically improve the interoperability and efficiency of the transportation infrastructure.