Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12

www.elsevier.com/locate/trc

Geographic information systems for transportation in

perspective
Jean-Claude Thill *
Department of Geography and National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, State University of New York at
Bu€alo, Bu€alo, NY 14261, USA

Abstract
The late 1980s saw the ®rst widespread use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in transportation
research and management. Due to the speci®c requirements of transportation applications and of the rather
late adoption of this information technology in transportation, research has been directed toward en-
hancing existing GIS approaches to enable the full range of capabilities needed in transportation research
and management. This paper places the concept of transportation GIS in the broader perspective of re-
search in GIS and Geographic Information Science. The emphasis is placed on the requirements speci®c of
the transportation domain of application of this emerging information technology as well as on core
research challenges. Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: GIS-T; Geographic information systems

1. Introduction

It is quite a paradox that the ®eld of transportation has at last come to embrace Geographic
Information Systems (GISs) as a key technology to support its research and operational needs,
while some of the early pioneers of GIS at the University of Washington and Northwestern
University were in fact transportation scientists. Over three decades have passed since these
missed opportunities for cross-fertilization. GIS has since evolved and matured from a tool, to a
technology, and ®nally to a legitimate domain of scienti®c inquiry called Geographic Information
Science (Goodchild, 1992a). In the meantime, transportation has distanced itself from its his-
torical roots in geographic and spatial sciences, but has also become increasingly multi-

*
Tel.: +1 716 645 2722; fax: +1 716 645 2329.
E-mail address: jcthill@acsu.bu€alo.edu (J.-C. Thill).

0968-090X/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 6 8 - 0 9 0 X ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 9 - 2
4 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12

disciplinary, thus re¯ecting the multi-faceted reality of transportation infrastructure and ¯ows and
movements of passengers and freight.
In the United States, the multi-disciplinary outlook of transportation has been fostered by
several key pieces of federal legislation passed in the 1990s (Meyer, 1999), including the Clean
Air Act Amendments, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Eciency Act, the American with
Disabilities Act, and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st century. All four acts contained
explicit requirements for local and state governments to consider transportation systems through
their interdependence with other natural, social, or economic systems. From the new integrative
mission of transportation studies grew the need for enhanced approaches to store, manipulate,
and analyze data spanning multiple themes: for instance, highway infrastructure, peak-time
trac ¯ow, transit o€ering (fare, frequency, reliability), population ethnicity, work force par-
ticipation, and air quality. O€ering a data management and modeling platform capable of
integrating a vast array of data from various sources, captured at di€erent resolutions (street
segments, census tracts, trac analysis zones, street corner, etc.), and on seemingly unrelated
themes, GIS has positioned itself as the ultimate information integration technology. In a GIS,
integration proceeds by referencing all objects to some common locational framework. With
proper conversion rules and algorithms, data stored in di€erent scales, projections and data
models can be registered to the same underlying referencing framework. It can be argued that
the present adoption of GIS in transportation brings the ®eld to a full circle as it is rediscov-
ering the primacy of space and place, two concepts that launched the systematic study of
transportation in Geography and Regional Science in the 1950s. The acronym GIS-T is often
employed to refer to the application and adaptation of GIS to research, planning, and man-
agement in transportation.
In this paper, I give an overview of the nature of GIS and place its evolution in context. I also
discuss the speci®city and requirements of GIS in transportation. Finally, some of the core re-
search themes in transportation GIS are highlighted.

2. The nature of geographic information systems

GISs are computer-based systems for the capture, storage, manipulation, display, and analysis
of geographic information. The multiple functionality a€orded by GIS distinguishes it from older
technologies. The integration of multiple functionalities within one rather seamless environment
dispenses users from mastering a collection of disparate, and specialized technologies. As it turns
out, this aspect is often held by organizations as one of the decisive criteria in their decision to
adopt GIS technology because of its eciency bene®ts.
The functional complexity of GIS is what makes it a system di€erent from any other. Without
geo-visualization capability, the GIS is merely a database management engine endowed with some
power to extract meaningful relationship between data entities. Without analytical capability, GIS
would be reduced to an automated mapping application. Without database management features,
GIS would be unable to capture spatial and topological relationships between geo-referenced
entities if these relationships were not pre-de®ned.
What sets GIS apart from other database management systems (DBMS) is not the nature of the
information handled. Indeed GIS and DBMS may contain exactly the same information, say fatal
 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12 5

accidents occurring on New York state highways during a given year. The di€erence between the
two systems is ``under the hood'', namely in the way information is referenced. A DBMS refer-
ences accidents by some unique index or combination of indexes, such as the date of occurrence,
the vehicle make, or the weather conditions. By contrast, information is all about a geographic
description of the surface of the Earth in a GIS. Each accident record is a geographic event in the
sense that it is tied to a unique location de®ned in a given referencing framework (global, national
or local datum). With the spatial referencing of objects, topology of the data can be de®ned, which
in turn enables a host of spatial query operations of objects and set of objects. For instance, the
task ``identify all accidents that occurred within 100 meters of any intersection on urban arterials''
requires little e€ort because of the spatial indexing of all accident and roadway link objects in the
GIS databases.
The concept of GIS traces its roots back to a handful of research initiatives in the US,
Canada and Europe during the late 1950s. It is widely acknowledged that the ®rst real GIS was
the Canada Geographic Information System set up for the Canada Land Inventory. The reader
will ®nd complete histories of GIS in Coppock and Rhind (1991) and Foresman (1998). It
suces to say here that the development of the concept and its implementations is closely
associated with the requirements of land information systems. Early transportation applications
of GIS were few and unable to create a momentum in GIS research sucient to remediate the
known limitations of the technology in handling transportation data, in interfacing with com-
plex analytical network-based models, and in ®tting in existing enterprise-wide business model.
Even the US Bureau of the CensusÕs Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) system ± pre-
cursor of the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) system
± does not qualify as a proper e€ort to enhance transportation GIS because of its crude
topology.
A GIS is a spatial representation, or model, of the data used to depict a portion of the surface
of the earth (Frank, 1992). In the transportation context, three classes of GIS models are relevant
(Goodchild, 1992b, 1998).
· Field models, or representation of the continuous variation of a phenomenon over space. Ter-
rain elevation uses this model.
· Discrete models, according to which discrete entities (points, lines or polygons) populate space.
Highway rest areas, toll barriers, urbanized areas may use this model.
· Network models to represent topologically connected linear entities (such as roads, rail lines, or
airlines) that are ®xed in the continuous reference surface.
While all three models may be useful in transportation, the network model built around the
concepts of arc and node plays the most prominent role in this application domain because single-
and multi-modal infrastructure networks are vital in enabling and supporting passenger and
freight movement. In fact, many transportation applications only require a network model to
represent data. Examples of such applications include:
· pavement and other facility management systems;
· real-time and o€-line routing procedures, including emergency vehicle dispatching and trac
assignment in the four-step urban transportation planning process;
· web-based trac information systems and trip planning engines;
· in-vehicle navigation systems;
· real-time congestion management and accident detection.
6 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12

3. What is special about GIS-T?

The previous section has identi®ed the main data models of GIS. It also stressed that a common
trait of research on, and with, GIS-T is its reliance on the network data model, at times at the
exclusion of any other data model. This is not to say that other domains of application have no
use for network representations, but when used at all, networks play a rather peripheral role. The
network model is elegantly simple, yet functional. With its arc and node structure, it represents the
one-dimensional network object in reference to the two- (or three-) dimensional surface of the
earth. Arcs and nodes themselves are primitives of the discrete entity model. Their locational
referencing is absolute, usually two-dimensional: x and y coordinates, longitude/latitude, for
example.
Once proper topology has been de®ned on the network, the network model supports basic as
well as advanced forms of network analysis (Waters, 1999; Souleyrette and Strauss, 2000), from
location±allocation modeling to vehicle routing and scheduling and trac assignment, and ®nally
to network connectivity optimization and design. Network-based GIS enables thus the study of
¯ows and movements, which lies at the core of transportation research.
Land information systems and early population census information systems have not conceived
of roadways, railways and other transportation infrastructure ``as features for analysis in and of
themselves'' (OÕNeill and Harper, 2000) because transportation lines, like other linear features ±
most singularly streams ± primarily serve to delineate polygons. In transportation research,
however, there is a compelling need for attributing infrastructure lines. This is in line with the
primary mission of transportation agencies to be custodian of the transportation infrastructure in
their jurisdiction, and maintain it in good operating condition (Petzold and Freund, 1990).
Furthermore, most models of network analysis mentioned above incorporate some measure of
travel impedance on each link of the network, while some of them also use link-speci®c trac
capacity attributes. It is also well known that the external validity of many models is greatly
enhanced by a better representation of trac conditions at nodes on the network (at grade in-
tersections, freeway entrances or exits). Nodes are remarkable locations on the network where
various restrictions to movement may exist and delay often develops in relation to the mixing of
trac streams. Node attributes may entail a rather elaborate description of an intersection by
trac priorities, the presence of trac signals, their timing and phase, among others.
So far, the implicit assumption has been that network links are homogeneous. This may hold
true in some systems, but not in others. Number of lanes, pavement width, pavement condition,
posted speed are all but a few attributes that cannot be constrained to be constant between ter-
minal nodes of a link. Similarly, on the National Highway System, trac parameters of speed,
¯ow and capacity cannot be expected to be constant between widely spaced junctions. The dy-
namic nature of these distributed attributes of the network precludes that the network be per-
manently edited to maintain the homogeneity of each link on each attribute. Instead an attribute
can be viewed as a spatial (linear) event occurring on the network. The variation of the attribute
can be referenced to discrete locations measured by relative positions on a linear feature belonging
to the network. In this approach, attributes are linearly referenced and linked dynamically to the
entities forming the network (Scarponcini, 1999). Early research in GIS in transportation led
Dueker (1987), Fletcher (1987), and Vonderohe et al. (1993) to identify the critical need for this
capability in GIS-T. Trac accidents, bridges, trac signs, and other zero-dimensional events can
 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12 7

also take advantage of linear referencing systems for linking to the one-dimensional transporta-
tion infrastructure.
Though the basic network data model is already a domain-speci®c departure from conventional
GIS data modeling, it does not suce to handle the complexity embedded in transportation
network data. As pointed by Goodchild (1998), extensions are needed to handle particular
structures. The following three meaningful extensions were recognized by Goodchild (1998).
· Planar versus non-planar model, wherein topological representation di€ers from cartographic
representation by not forcing nodes at cartographic intersections. Non-planarity allows the rep-
resentation of freeway overpasses as well as of turn prohibitions. Navigational databases must
conform to a non-planar model.
· Turn tables contain properties of the turn between any pair of links connected on the network.
Properties can be binary (allowed, disallowed), or cardinal measurements (for instance, expect-
ed delay through an intersection).
· Links are objects formed of trac lanes. A structure allowing for this object-oriented view of
the infrastructure needs to de®ne topology between lanes. It may store attributes for individual
lanes.
Certainly the need for these and other extensions to the base network model is not universal. It
can be motivated by the resolution and the geographic scale of the representation. Ultimately,
need is dictated by the speci®c GIS-T application. The representation a€orded by extensions of
this kind is essential for the development of navigational databases. On the other hand, it is most
likely to be super¯uous in a task of transportation planning for an entire metropolitan area.
To sum up, GIS in transportation is more than just one more domain of application of generic
GIS functionality. GIS-T has several data modeling, data manipulation, and data analysis re-
quirements that are not ful®lled by conventional GIS. The ®nal report of NCHRP Project 20-27
(Vonderohe et al., 1993) theorizes GIS-T as the product of the cross-fertilization of an enhanced
GIS and an enhanced Transportation Information System (TIS). See Fig. 1. To quote Vonderohe
et al. (1993), ``the necessary enhancement to existing TISs is the structuring of the attribute

Fig. 1. GIS-T, product of an enhanced GIS and an enhanced TIS. After Vonderohe et al. (1993).
8 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12

databases to provide consistent location reference data in a form compatible with the GIS, which
in turn has been enhanced to represent and process geographic data in the forms required for
transportation applications'' (p. 11).

4. The challenges brought by sux ``T''

The current ¯urry of research activity in and around GIS-T is a clear sign of the interest of
transportation researchers and professionals for this still emerging technology. Some of the new
trends discernible in state-of-the-art research in GIS-T merely echo the transformations of GIS
per se. Some of these transformations are technologically motivated (Fletcher, 2000). Others are
part of an agenda set forth by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science
(UCGIS) to strengthen the scienti®c basis of this emerging discipline born to the GIS technology.
In 1997, UCGIS outlined a research agenda composed of research priorities in ten areas. These
priorities are listed in Table 1. The state of research in GIS-T with respect to each of the UCGIS
priorities has recently been compiled by Wiggins et al. (2000). This section points to selected
research themes and challenges that are particularly salient in contemporary GIS-T research.
Research themes and challenges may manifest themselves di€erently on di€erent functional
aspects of GIS. It is imperative therefore to discuss them in a functional framework. For the sake
of the exposition, GIS functionality is here organized in relation to the level of intensity of data
processing involved. A commonplace framework derived from this line of thought identi®es three
functional groups: data management, which concerns storage and retrieval of data; data ma-
nipulation, which refers to the creation of new data out of raw data; and data analysis or ana-
lytical modeling. See McCormack and Nyerges (1997) for a similar framework in the context of
GIS-T. Interestingly, requirements associated to each group are not independent. As data ma-
nipulation requires data storage, and modeling is built on the latter two, requirements and
challenges are cumulative. This hierarchical view of functionality is depicted in Fig. 2. This logic is
also followed in the organization of the contributions included in this volume dedicated to GIS in
transportation research. Many of the themes introduced in the rest of this paper are further de-
veloped in these contributions.

Table 1
UCGIS Research Priorities for Geographic Information Science
(1) Spatial data acquisition and integration
(2) Distributed computing
(3) Extensions to geographic representation
(4) Cognition of geographic information
(5) Interoperability of geographic information
(6) Scale
(7) Spatial analysis in a GIS environment
(8) The future of the spatial information infrastructure
(9) Uncertainty in spatial data and GIS-based analyses
(10) GIS and society
 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12 9

Fig. 2. Hierarchical model of data management, data manipulation, and data analysis functional groups.

4.1. Legacy data management system

Transportation agencies have a long tradition of maintaining comprehensive inventories of the

transportation infrastructure, of its condition and usage by the public. As a norm, multiple legacy
TIS co-exist within an agency. It is not uncommon that each TIS handles a single type of in-
formation (bridge inventory, highway planning network, pavement management system, accident
inventory, etc.) with its own data, and is runs on its own hardware and software platform. A
serious challenge of GIS-T is to transfer disparate data into a uni®ed data management system
that preserves access to legacy data, and allows for their integration to meet the demands of multi-
thematic analysis. GIS-T can play this integrator role if, and only if, frameworks are established
for the communication and exchange of data among disparate data models so as to enable
multivariate analysis and modeling and support decision making in transportation policy and
management. Some of the options available include generic relational data models, new dynamic
segmentation data standards, and object-oriented data models.

4.2. Data interoperability

Transportation data are typically maintained by a variety of agencies and private data pro-
viders. Each data source may have its own data model, and because of di€erent data capture
techniques and standards, accuracy may be quite heterogeneous across data sets. Diversity of data
models and approaches available to circumvent this problem are mentioned in Section 4.1. Errors
in data position, topology, classi®cation and inclusion, naming and attributing, linear measure-
ment render con¯ation of data of various sources an onerous task with haphazard outcomes.
Advances in this domain will only be possible if the GIS-T research agenda follows a three-prong
approach: algorithms for map matching, models of error and error propagation in transportation
data (in particular in the context of one-dimensional data model), data quality standards and data
exchange standards.
10 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12

The interoperability issue is quickly becoming one of the most pressing themes in GIS-T as geo-
referenced data ®nd their way into the market place. Detailed digital street databases populate
and routing and dispatching systems for emergency services, and vehicle navigation systems
available to the general public and to ¯eets of commercial vehicles. Elements of Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) that involve wireless communication between motorists and a
trac control center or information service provider necessitate unambiguous identi®cation of the
motorist locations within a reasonable range of accuracy. The agenda set forth above will con-
tribute to enabling new generations of wireless information services.

4.3. Real-time GIS-T

Geo-referenced data are increasingly collected as part of a continuous process rather than at a
few pre-set moments in time. Need has also emerged for accessing data on a real-time basis. For
instance, continuous streams of trac data from vehicles carrying toll transponders on parts of
New York stateÕs freeway system are fed into computational algorithms for early accident de-
tection. In other metropolitan regions, probe vehicles equipped with a Global Positioning System
(GPS) device provide speed data to the Trac Management Center, which in turn disseminates
congestion information and forecasts to wireless information service providers, thus ®tting in the
areaÕs Congestion Management System. This (quasi) real-time trac data is also a primary input
of world-wide-web applications discussed below. Real-time data storage, retrieval, processing,
and analysis are presently not meeting the needs of society when it comes to geo-referenced data.
Quicker access data models, and more powerful spatial data fusion techniques and dynamic
routing algorithms are needed to take advantage of real-time trac information.

4.4. Large data sets

Real-world transportation problems tend to involve large amounts of geo-referenced data and
large networks. Visualization techniques on which GIS mapping is based are inherited from an
age where data was not abundant. GIS-T will bene®t from an evolution in Geographic Infor-
mation Science research towards close integration of geo-visualization principles and computa-
tional methods of knowledge discovery and data mining. As the latter are still very much in their
infancy, no tangible outcome should be expected in the near future. With GIS-T, the complexity is
compounded by the diculty to visualize information on the single dimension of a network.
The sheer size of transportation data sets often require innovative system designs that manage
both to optimize speed and accuracy of the display of information and to optimize the run time of
algorithms and analytical tools of ¯ow and network analysis.

4.5. Distributed computing

The connectivity o€ered by the Internet technology has transformed the relationship between
the computer, the software application, the data, and the user. Computing has emerged as a
mobile, distributed, and ubiquitous reality. Web-based GIS applications have become com-
monplace, including in the domain of transportation. Real-time transit route and schedule in-
formation, road construction, trac information are examples of applications than are currently
 J.-C. Thill / Transportation Research Part C 8 (2000) 3±12 11

available. Remaining challenges revolve around bringing to the Internet client-server environment
the power of desktop GIS-T. This entails the development of more powerful and robust analytical
tools to ®t the limited distributed computing resources and limited bandwidth on communication
networks. Also, system architectures will need to be judiciously designed to make ecient use of
local and remote computing resources.
The future ± no longer distant ± of mobile computing is with Internet-enabled Personal Digital
Assistants (PDA), Personal Navigation Assistants (PNA), and other on-board computing devices.
All the issues brought up earlier in this section are considerably magni®ed in this setting due to the
more severe constraints on bandwidth and local computing resources. An issue re-emerging in this
context is that of geo-referencing of remote service users and tracking of their movement in real-
time.

5. Conclusions

The late 1980s saw the ®rst widespread use of GIS in transportation research and management.
Due to the speci®c requirements of transportation applications and of the rather late adoption of
this information technology in transportation, research has been directed toward enhancing ex-
isting GIS approaches to enable the full range of capabilities needed in transportation research
and management.
This paper placed the concept of transportation GIS in the broader perspective of research in
geographic information systems and Geographic Information Science. The emphasis was placed
on the requirements speci®c of the transportation domain of application of this emerging infor-
mation technology. The paper concluded with a synopsis of dominant themes in current research
in GIS for transportation. Successful pursuit of this agenda should solidify the position of GIS as
an integrative system for transportation research and management.

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