“The systemic nature of urban transportation is also the key to its solution. We need to stop focusing only on pieces of the problem: adding a new bridge, widening a road, putting up signs, establishing commuter lanes, encouraging carpooling or deploying traffic copters. Instead, we need to look at relationships across the entire system—and all [...]

When filmmakers envision the future of our transportation system, they often seem to come up with one enduring image — millions of layers of flying cars breezing effortlessly through impossibly dense cities, surrounded by mile-high skyscrapers. There’s a good chance the future may not look quite so, well, futuristic. But that doesn’t mean that advanced computer technology — namely, wireless networks known as Intelligent Transportation Systems that feed through our transportation infrastructure — won’t have a huge role to play in helping move people and goods safer, more efficiently, and with less pollution in the 21st Century.