Edinburgh Napier University

  Members of the Transportation Research Board's Committee on Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems (A1D08) lead the research community in many of the following areas: using census data in transportation planning, monitoring traffic and transit systems, using intelligent transportation systems-generated data in planning, using household survey data in describing traveler characteristics and metropolitan travel patterns, combining data sources, studying issues of data privacy and confidentiality, and creating standards for meta-data and meta-analysis. This paper provides a perspective on these issues and a look at the opportunities and challenges that will face urban transportation planners in the 21st century. The themes explored in this paper include the issues related to continuous data collection, the use of global positioning systems and other technologies in urban transportation data, the use of small area land use and socioeconomic data in metropolitan planning, privacy and data ownership concerns, and the concept of information from data.