A Survey of Value Added Resellers: Private Sector Views on Advanced Traveler Information Markets

This is a case study of publidprivate partnerships for the implementation of TravInfo, an advanced traveler information system for the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose of the paper is to illuminate private sector views on how the public/private partnership should work in order to successfilly implement TravInfo. This paper reports on the analysis of a series of interviews conducted among those private sector firms who are participating in the federal Field Operational Test of TravInfo. The firms interviewed range from product manufacturers to service providers, including traffic information reporting firms, geographic data collection and dissemination firms and ATIS device distributors. The interview data were analyzed using the cluster analysis concept. The results of the interviews indicate that the private sector strongly supports a publidprivate partnership and that the private firms believe that the partnership is essential to the success of ATIS deployment; cooperation between the private and public sectors was rated as most important for the Bay Area ATIS implementation. However, the study also reveals that the firms’ views on the concept of publidprivate partnerships differed significantly. These disparate views were closely associated with individual firms’ marketing strategies, the nature of the products and services which they offer and with the deployment stages of ATIS products and services. The firms expecting near-term benefits from ATIS projects were more enthusiastic in their support for public/private partnerships than were those expecting long-term benefits from ATIS. The general consensus of the firms interviewed suggested that there is a lack of established public policy direction in the field operational experiment regarding long-term goals and near-term implementation strategies.