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Geographic information systems for

transportation: from a static past to a dynamic
future

Shih-Lung Shaw

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transportation: from a static past to a dynamic future, Annals of GIS, 16:3, 129-140, DOI:
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Annals of GIS
Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2010, 129–140

Geographic information systems for transportation: from a static past to a dynamic future
Shih-Lung Shaw*
Department of Geography, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA
(Received 1 June 2010; final version received 19 June 2010)

Geographic information systems for transportation earned its moniker of GIS-T because of active GIS-T research and
applications carried out over the years. There were several GIS-T books and review papers published around the turn of the
twenty-first century. As we are now 10 years into the new century, it is an appropriate time to assess the past accomplishments
and look into the future of GIS-T. This article first discusses the ‘T’ in GIS-T with a review of the critical transportation issues
identified by the US Transportation Research Board. Past GIS-T developments are then presented from three different
perspectives of using GIS-T as a spatial database, using GIS-T as an analysis and modeling environment, and using GIS-T
as a communication tool. Because of the static map layers view and the conventional GIS data models, past GIS-T
developments are weak in handling dynamic movements, changes, and processes in transportation systems. Our world, on
the other hand, has become increasingly dynamic because of the widespread use of modern information and communication
technologies. GIS-T therefore must transform itself to accommodate this dynamic and changing world. A discussion of the
dynamic future of GIS-T is presented in this article.
Keywords: GIS for transportation (GIS-T); data model; dynamic process; tracking data; temporal GIS

1. Introduction addition, a number of NCHRP reports related to GIS-T,

In our book of Geographic information systems for trans-
portation: principles and applications (Miller and Shaw
2001), we state that geographic information systems for
transportation (GIS-T) have arrived and represent one of
the most important applications of GIS. This statement is an
echo of what Nigel Waters (1999) suggests in his article
‘Transportation GIS: GIS-T’ published in Geographic
information systems: techniques, management and applica-
tions (Longley et al. 1999). GIS-T, which refer to ‘the
application of information technology and related knowl-
edge to transportation problem’ (Miller and Shaw 2001,
p. v), were actively pursued by GIS researchers and trans-
portation professionals at the turn of the twenty-first century
when Harvey Miller and I were finalizing our book manu-
script. Among these GIS-T activities, the National
Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) of the
US Transportation Research Board (TRB) sponsored three
phases of the NCHRP 20–27 project led by Alan Vonderohe
and Teresa Adams, which included NCHRP 20–27:
Adaptation of geographic information systems for transpor-
tation (1990–1993), NCHRP 20–27(2): Development of
system and application architectures for geographic infor-
mation systems in transportation (1994–1997), and NCHRP
20–27(3): Guidelines for the implementation of multimodal
transportation location referencing systems (1998–2001). In
such as Implementation of geographic information systems
(GIS) in state DOTs (1991), Management guide for imple-
mentation of geographic information systems (GIS) in state
DOTs (1993), A generic data model for linear referencing
systems (1997), Development of system and application
architectures for geographic information systems in trans-
portation (1998), and Guidelines for the implementation of
multimodal transportation location referencing systems
(2001), were published.1
In the meantime, there had been many GIS-T sessions and
paper presentations at various professional meetings such as
GIS/LIS conferences, Environmental Systems Research
Institute (ESRI) user conferences, URISA conferences, and
annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers
(AAG). Furthermore, a Geospatial Information Systems for
Transportation Symposium sponsored by the American
Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials
(AASHTO) had been held since the 1980s. By 1999, ESRI
published the first GIS-T book Transportation GIS (Lang
1999) that presents selected GIS-T applications ranging
from highway maintenance, commuter rail service to airport
design. It was followed by an edited volume of Geographic
information systems in transportation research (Thill 2000a)
that consists of 22 articles copublished in special issues of
Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. In

*Email: sshaw@utk.edu
1
For a list of NCHRP publications, visit http://www.trb.org/Publications/PubsNCHRPPublications.aspx.

ISSN 1947-5683 print/ISSN 1947-5691 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/19475683.2010.513155
http://www.informaworld.com
130
2001, Geographic information systems for transportation:
principles and applications (Miller and Shaw 2001) was
published by Oxford University Press that provides a sys-
tematic presentation of the key concepts and selected applica-
tions of GIS-T. Furthermore, three review papers of GIS-T
were published in 2000. Goodchild (2000) offers a review of
the status and challenges of GIS-T. Thill (2000b) places the
concept of GIS-T in the broader perspective of GIS and
geographic information science. Fletcher (2000) publishes a
report of the TRB Committee on Spatial Data and Information
Science (A5015) that discusses the trends, directions, and
influences shaping the next generation of GIS-T.
With these active GIS-T activities taking place at the
dawn of the twenty-first century, it was justifiable to declare
that GIS-T had arrived although many research and applica-
tion challenges were unresolved yet. We are now 10 years
into the new century. How are the GIS-T challenges today
different from what we had a decade ago? Are GIS-T mov-
ing in a direction consistent with our changing world? This
article offers a review of the past efforts in GIS-T and
discusses the new GIS-T challenges. The author recognizes
that GIS and geographic information science (GIScience)
have different focuses and cover different scopes
(Goodchild 1992). However, for the sake of simplicity,
this article uses GIS-T to imply research and application
issues related to both GIS and GIScience. The remaining
sections of this article are organized as follows. The next
section discusses the ‘T’ in GIS-T to highlight the impor-
tance of keeping transportation in mind when we work with
GIS-T. Section 3 reviews GIS-T developments in the past.
Section 4 presents the key changes we face in GIS-T today
and how the GIS-T community needs to respond to these
challenges. The final section offers concluding remarks.
2. The ‘T’ in GIS-T
One of the major challenges encountered in GIS-T has been
the communications between GIS professionals and trans-
portation professionals. GIS people often consider transpor-
tation needs from a GIS perspective and treat them as GIS
problems. As a result, transportation problems are forced to
fit into a GIS framework even though the GIS framework is
not designed for the specific transportation needs. Many
GIS-T implementations at various transportation agencies
therefore are unable to achieve their intended benefits partly
because of this mismatch between GIS solutions and trans-
portation needs. The field of transportation has developed
many specific ways of collecting, managing, and analyzing
data over the years to address various needs in transporta-
tion planning, operation, and management. GIS, on the
other hand, have been mostly developed as a general-
purpose system to meet the needs of a wide range of
2
Walter Tobler gave a presentation entitled ‘The world is shriveling as it shrinks’ at the Texas A&M University on 26 October 2001. A copy
of this presentation is available at http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/,tobler/presentations/shows/Shrinkng_files/frame.htm.
S.-L. Shaw
application domains. Although the mismatch between
transportation and GIS has narrowed over time, this chal-
lenge remains as the two fields continue to evolve indepen-
dently in many aspects. It therefore is important to keep the
‘T’ in mind when we formulate GIS-T research questions
and develop GIS-T applications.
GIS-T is special because of the ‘T’ in its name. Due to
the spatial separations of resources, services, and people, we
must move goods, services, information, and people among
different locations to fulfill our physiological, economic,
and social needs. Transportation therefore is a necessity in
human societies. Throughout the human history we have
observed many transportation technology advancements
that improved our means of reaching farther places or mov-
ing goods more efficiently. Janelle (1968) introduces a
time–space concept to describe a ‘shrinking world’ because
of the reduced travel time enabled by new transportation
technologies. If we visit our local stores such as a Wal-Mart
store today, it is not surprising to find that many (if not most)
items are produced in other parts of the world. These items
are shipped over long distances to reach our local stores, yet
they are priced at reasonable levels. This suggests that the
transportation systems today have reached a very efficient
level to support the global economy. Information systems
certainly have played an important role in achieving a high
level of transportation efficiency. At the 1999 ESRI inter-
national user conference, Waldo Tobler further suggests that
‘the world is shriveling as it shrinks’ to point out that
transportation services are very uneven across different
locations.2 Shipments of goods around the world and differ-
ential transportation services at various locations are clearly
spatial problems. In fact, transportation is spatial in nature
although it also includes some non-spatial aspects. There is
no doubt that GIS can contribute to the spatial aspects of
transportation problems. The challenge is how GIS and
transportation can work together to maximize the combined
power of ‘G’ and ‘T’ in GIS-T.
There are two complementary approaches to GIS-T
research and application developments. One approach is to
enhance the current GIS functions and/or develop new GIS
functions to meet various transportation research and appli-
cation needs. In other words, we look for what GIS cannot
do and find out ways of extending the current GIS capabil-
ities to meet transportation needs. The other approach is to
use the existing GIS functions to develop GIS-T applica-
tions that can improve the current practices of transportation
planning, operation, and management. A simple example
could be replacing straight-line distance measures with net-
work distance measures in transportation analysis as GIS
can easily compute network distances. Using spatial analy-
sis functions in GIS to help us examine spatial patterns of
transportation data such as traffic flows and traffic accidents
 Annals of GIS 131

Table 1. The most critical transportation issues identified by the Table 2. Mobility measures for 439 selected US urban areas.
Executive Committee of the US Transportation Research Board.
Mobility measures 1982 1997 2007
Critical transportation issues Brief description
Annual delay per peak traveler (hours) 14 32 36
1. Congestion Increasingly congested facilities Travel time index 1.09 1.20 1.25
across all modes Wasted fuel per peak traveler (gallons) 9 21 24
2. Energy, environment, Extraordinary challenges Daily travel on major roads (billion 1.68 2.93 3.82
and climate change vehicle-miles)
3. Infrastructure Enormous, aging capital stock to Lane-miles of freeways and major 15,500 16,532 12,676
maintain streets added every year
4. Finance Inadequate revenues
5. Equity Burdens on the disadvantaged Source: Schrank and Lomax (2009).
6. Emergency preparedness, Vulnerability to natural disasters
response, and mitigation and terrorist strikes
7. Safety Insufficient improvement
8. Institutions Twentieth century institutions 2009), transportation problems encountered in the US
mismatched to Twenty-first urban areas confirm the challenges listed in Table 1.
century missions Average delay per peak traveler in the US urban areas
9. Human and intellectual Inadequate investment in increased from 14 hours in 1982 to 36 hours in 2007
capital innovation (Table 2). Travel time index, which is computed as the
Source: US TRB 2009. ratio of travel time in the peak period to travel time at
free-flow conditions, grew from 1.09 in 1982 to 1.25 in
2007. Wasted fuel per peak traveler because of congestion
could be other examples. These two approaches are com- jumped from 9 gallons in 1982 to 24 gallons in 2007. In the
plementary to each other because they can help advance meantime, daily travel on major roads rose from 1.68 billion
both GIS and transportation fields. vehicle-miles in 1982 to 3.82 billion vehicle-miles in 2007.
Next, let us take a look at the transportation challenges Lane-miles of freeways and major streets added every year,
we face today that are potential candidates of applying the on the other hand, dropped from 15,500 lane-miles in 1982
above approaches. The Executive Committee of the TRB to 12,676 lane-miles in 2007. A review of the national
periodically identifies critical issues in transportation that transportation statistics compiled by the US Bureau of
are likely to have impacts on the US economy and quality of Transportation Statistics gives us a similar picture. Table 3
life. Nine critical transportation issues are identified in the shows that vehicle-miles roughly doubled for all travel
report of Critical issues in transportation: 2009 update (US modes nationwide from 1985 to 2007, whereas transportation
TRB 2009; see Table 1). This is a list of daunting chal- energy consumption continued to rise and the gap between
lenges. These challenges clearly are connected with each transportation revenues and expenditures for federal, state,
other and cannot be solved independently. For example, we and local governments continued to increase over time.
need to consider the potential impacts on energy and envir- In 2007, the Committee on Geographic Information
onment while we are trying to improve mobility. Also, it Science and Applications (ABJ60) of the TRB also pub-
would be difficult to take care of the aging transportation lished a report of Grand challenges in transportation: the
infrastructure without adequate revenues to support it. role of geographic information systems and science. This
According to the 2009 urban mobility report published by report includes seven grand challenges in transportation as
the Texas Transportation Institute (Schrank and Lomax listed below (US TRB 2007, pp. 2–3):

Table 3. Selected US national transportation statistics.

US National Transportation Statistics 1985 1995 2007
Total vehicle-miles (billions)
Air (air carriers, large certificated, domestic, all service) 3.0 4.6 6.7
Highways (total) 1774 2423 3030
Transit (total) 2.8 3.6 4.2
Rail (total train-miles) 377 490 581
Energy consumption
Transportation (quadrillion BTU) 20.09 23.85 29.13
Transportation as percentage of total energy consumption 26.3% 26.2% 28.7%
Government transportation-related revenues and expenditures
Total government revenues (current $ billions) – 94.5 157.3
Total government expenditures (current $ billions) – 143.3 221.7
Source: US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/#chapter_1.
132 S.-L. Shaw
 Infrastructure renewal and asset management. How
do we preserve and renovate saturated transportation
systems while minimizing expected increases in the
investment of resources?
 Operations and congestion. Can we maintain current
or achieve improved levels of performance without
substantial physical expansion?
 Environment. Can we reduce the direct and indirect
environmental footprints and achieve a sustainable
transportation system despite increasing population
and travel demands?
 Safety. Can we substantially reduce the number of
transportation crashes without significantly reducing
the efficiency and responsiveness of transportation
systems?
 Security. Can we prevent the improper and unauthor-
ized use of transportation systems, and reduce our
vulnerability to their disruption, without seriously
restricting mobility or violating individual rights?
 Planning and programming. A challenge is to enable
planners to effectively utilize the rapidly growing
body of geospatial data and information technologies
to better address critical transportation issues.
 Science. The challenges facing transportation sys-
tems are great and require new modes of thinking
and analysis for their solution.
This committee report offers a vision and a set of
research and development needs for each of the seven
grand challenges. The suggested research and development
needs for each grand challenge are organized by areas such
as data collection, data integration, data quality, data mod-
els, data mining, spatiotemporal data modeling, analysis
and forecasting methods, model integration, visualization,
scenario planning, and decision support. Readers are
encouraged to read the committee report for details. It
should be noted that most of these grand challenges are
not new to the transportation field. Many research and
development needs listed in this report are not new to
GIS-T either. The GIS-T community has worked on many
of these challenges and needs for at least two decades. What
have we accomplished so far? What do we need to think
differently as we develop the next generation of GIS-T that
will be capable of addressing the above transportation chal-
lenges? The next section reviews the main accomplishments
of GIS-T in the past decades, followed by another section
that discusses the future directions.
3. Static past of GIS-T
Data representation is a fundamental focus of GIS. The
vector versus raster GIS debate in the early days of GIS
development is a good example of this focus. Many GIS-T
development efforts in the past three decades also focused
on data representations and data models for transportation
data. Another important foundation of GIS is the map layers
approach. Both vector and raster GIS databases organize
spatial data into different GIS map layers. Each layer repre-
sents a snapshot of specific thematic data (e.g., street net-
work) at a particular time. Whenever there are changes to
the spatial features in a map layer, the old map layer is
updated or a new map layer is created to reflect the changes.
Different map layers in a GIS database are treated as sepa-
rate and independent layers. Spatial relationships between
different GIS layers are derived from GIS operations such as
map overlays. This design is very inefficient and ineffective
for the analysis of changes over time. As a result, GIS
databases are static in nature.
There are many types of transportation data and transpor-
tation applications. Some of them have unique characteristics
that require special considerations in GIS. Goodchild (2000)
presents an assessment of GIS-T status and challenges by
characterizing GIS-T evolution into three stages: the map
view, the navigation view, and the behavioral view. The
map view favors GIS-T applications related to data inventory
and raises concerns of data accuracy and interoperability. The
navigation view focuses on network connectivity and differ-
ent representations related to map scales. The behavioral
view deals with movements of discrete objects based on
Hägerstrand’s time geography (Hägerstrand 1970). This arti-
cle takes a different approach of reviewing the past GIS-T
developments by organizing the discussions into ‘GIS-T as a
spatial database’, ‘GIS-T as an analysis and modeling envir-
onment,’ and ‘GIS-T as a communication tool.’
3.1. GIS-T as a spatial database
Transportation data can be grouped into transportation net-
works (e.g., highway network, transit network, railway net-
work, airline network), transportation features (e.g., traffic
signals, traffic signs, guard rails, transit terminals), traffic
data (e.g., traffic counts, traffic accidents), and other rele-
vant data (e.g., demographic data, socioeconomic data,
administrative units). As transportation networks are the
foundation of GIS-T data representations, they are dis-
cussed separately from the other types of transportation
data in this section.
3.1.1. Transportation networks
Vector GIS are the preferred choice for representing trans-
portation networks for both display and analysis purposes.
Early vector GIS adopted the topological data model devel-
oped in the 1960s for the Dual Independent Map Encoding
(DIME) files of the US Bureau of Census. This data model
is based on the concept of planar enforcement that splits
network lines into links at all locations where network lines
cross each other. Network nodes are created at the begin and
the end points of each link. A network link is identified with
topological information of its begin node ID, end node ID,
 Annals of GIS
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Figure 1. Different representations of street centerlines: (a) single
centerlines; (b) single centerlines with overpass/underpass;
(c) double centerlines with multiple intersection points; and
(d) double centerlines with single intersection point.
left polygon ID, and right polygon ID. This topological data
model permits automatic checks of the logical consistency
among nodes, links, and polygons. In addition, topology
provides connectivity information among links and nodes
that can be used for navigation and other network analysis
purposes.3
At the simplest level, we can represent network geome-
try as a set of intersecting centerlines at nodes (Figure 1a).
This simple representation is fine for cartographic display of
network geometry. However, this simple representation
encounters various problems when it is used for navigation
and other network analysis purposes. For example, Figure
1b shows an overpass where turns are not feasible between
these two crossing streets. We therefore need to have an
exception of the planar enforcement rule under the topolo-
gical data model by not creating a node at this crossing
point. The CLEAN and BUILD commands in Workstation
ArcInfo, which implements a topological data model, are
designed to take care of planar versus non-planar situations.
When it is necessary to represent the carriageways in both
directions, we can have one centerline for each direction.
This dual-centerline representation can create multiple
nodes at a street intersection (Figure 1c). This may be an
undesirable way of representing the configuration of an
intersection in some transportation applications. An alter-
native representation is to have a single node connecting to
the centerlines in all directions (Figure 1d). In addition to
the geometric representation of network links and nodes, it
is equally important to represent permissible turn move-
ments at street intersections. A common approach is to
create a turn table that records the turn impedance value
of each turn from a specific link to another link at individual
intersections. A negative impedance value normally implies
a prohibited turn. A turn table therefore not only takes care
3
In more recent GIS software based on the object-oriented concepts, topology is used to define feature behavior and rules rather than a data
structure.
133
of the prohibited turns but also considers different turn
impedance values associated with various turns at an inter-
section. Nevertheless, this turn table approach is unable to
properly handle complex turns with multiple intermediate
links. An alternative approach is to create turn features that
represent the details of turn movements involving multiple
links and nodes (Butler 2008). One-way streets are another
important consideration in navigation and network analysis
applications. In a single-centerline network representation
(e.g., Figure 1a), we can add a Boolean data value (i.e., 0
or 1) to each link indicating if a link is traversable in the
direction with or against the recorded link direction. If no
restriction is specified in the Boolean data field, a link is a
two-way street.
Although it is common practice to represent different
transportation networks as separate map layers, we some-
times need to represent a multimodal network. For example,
a person makes a work trip that consists of a park-and-ride
drive from home to a subway station, a subway ride, and
then a walk from a subway station to his/her workplace.
This scenario clearly requires a multimodal network. A
typical solution is to create transfer links at the connection
nodes between different networks and assign impedance
values to these transfer links. Lee (2007), for example,
uses transfer links to connect a street network with a three-
dimensional GIS data model for navigation between differ-
ent floors within a building and the street network outside
the building. One situation that vector GIS network repre-
sentations cannot properly handle is off-network move-
ments. For example, people could walk across an open
space, in a park, or inside a shopping mall in many possible
ways. Boats in a lake or vehicles in an open space also can
move freely in all possible directions. Upchurch et al.
(2004) take a raster GIS approach and develop a linked
on–off network (LOON) model to derive a set of mutually
exclusive network-based service zones around light rail
stations. Raster GIS certainly are a good choice for analyz-
ing off-network movements. It would be more beneficial,
however, to develop a multimodal network that accommo-
dates both vector and raster representations for navigation
and other network analysis applications.
Scale is another consideration when we choose a net-
work representation. Different GIS-T applications fre-
quently require different scales to represent the same
network. For example, transportation planners may be fine
with a network representation at a small scale that shows
streets as centerlines. This network representation, however,
is inadequate to support traffic engineering applications that
require a display of all traffic lanes and the street median. In
this case, it is necessary to create multiple representations of
the same transportation network in a GIS-T database. This
scale issue applies to other transportation features too. For
134 S.-L. Shaw
example, a bus terminal can be represented as either a point
or a polygon. A bridge can be represented as a point, a line,
or a polygon depending on the application requirements.
Dueker and Butler (1998) present a GIS-T enterprise data
model that is designed for all map scales, all transportation
modes, all software products, and all data collection meth-
ods. The multimodal, multidimensional location referen-
cing system (MDLRS) developed by the NCHRP 20–27
(3) project also has a functional requirement of multiple
cartographic/spatial topological representations (Adams
et al. 2001). This MDLRS data model permits a one-to-
many relationship between a transportation feature and
spatial objects. A spatial object in turn is described by one
or more geometric or topological objects. In addition, the
MDLRS data model allows a many-to-many relationship
between topological objects and geometric objects. A scale
applicability constraint is defined to indicate the valid scale
range of a spatial object. The different scenarios presented
in Figure 1 are examples of various geometric and topolo-
gical representations of the same street network.
If we need to represent individual traffic lanes in a
GIS-T database, it brings up additional challenges for repre-
senting the geometry and topology among traffic lanes
(Gottsegen et al. 1994, Goodchild 1998, Miller and Shaw
2001, Cova and Johnson 2003). We could represent the
geometry of individual traffic lanes using parallel center-
lines. However, this representation cannot properly reflect
the connectivity among different traffic lines. For example,
how do we represent the topological relationships between
the through lanes and the turn lanes (e.g., right-turn lane,
left-turn lane, combined through and right-turn lane)?
Because of the flexibility needed to represent network geo-
metry versus network topology, modern vector GIS soft-
ware has moved away from the conventional topological
data model to allow more flexible dual representations of
geometry and topology. ArcGIS geodatabase data model is
an example of such dual representations of transportation
networks (Butler 2008).
3.1.2. Transportation features, traffic data, and other
relevant data
There are various types of transportation features and traffic
data located along the lines in a network. Traffic signs,
guard rails, number of traffic lanes, pavement conditions,
traffic counts, and traffic accident data are some examples.
Various linear referencing methods have been developed to
record locations along the linear features in a network
(Nyerges 1990). A linear referencing method is a one-
dimensional measurement system that determines a location
along a linear feature based on the offset distance from a
pre-defined beginning point. It is theoretically feasible to
segment network links into the smallest common denomi-
nator such that all linear referencing data items can be
recorded using the smallest common network segments.
This approach, however, is not practical because we will
have to re-segment network links whenever changes to any
of the linear referencing data items become incompatible
with the current segmentation scheme (Miller and Shaw
2001, Huang 2003).
As the conventional GIS are based on two-dimensional
coordinate systems, they are not designed to handle one-
dimensional linear referencing data. In response to the
needs of representing and managing linear referencing data
in GIS, a dynamic segmentation approach is developed to
map the locations of various linear referencing data onto
network links. Dynamic segmentation first assembles net-
work links into individual routes. A route is defined by a set
of selected network links or partial links. Linear referencing
data of various transportation features and traffic conditions
are stored in event tables that include a unique route ID and
the linear measure(s) along the route. Point events are identi-
fied by single linear measures along a route, whereas linear
events require a begin linear measure and an end linear
measure along a route. For example, a traffic accident (i.e.,
a point event) is recorded at 3.6 miles on Route 101 and the
pavement condition (i.e., a line event) is poor from 2.5 to 4.3
miles on Route 101. Dynamic segmentation functions will
first find the specific route and then map linear referencing
measures onto the route in the GIS network layer. Most
dynamic segmentation implementations also offer event
overlay functions to analyze the relative locations of different
linear referencing data on individual routes. In the above
example, it means that an event overlay function can auto-
matically identify that the particular traffic accident occurred
on a road segment with a poor pavement condition.
In addition to linear referencing data, transportation agen-
cies also work with many other types of data. For example,
many transportation studies use spatial interaction data that
involve pairs of locations such as origin–destination (O-D)
flow data in travel demand analysis. Relational databases
implemented in most GIS software, which represent GIS
features in table rows and attribute data fields in table col-
umns, are not compatible with an O-D matrix that has both
rows and columns in a matrix refer to GIS features
(e.g., flows between pairs of traffic analysis zones, TAZ).
As a workaround, some GIS vendors use two separate attri-
bute data fields in a relational table to represent pairs of GIS
features and store the data values associated with each pair in
additional attribute data fields. This workaround solution
cannot support true matrix operations. Some GIS vendors
(e.g., TransCAD by Caliper Corporation, Newton, MA,
USA) implement a special matrix data type to support spatial
interaction data. GIS-T databases also need to support many
other kinds of data such as census data, environmental data,
and administrative boundaries. Dueker and Butler’s enter-
prise data model and NCHRP 20–27 (3) project’s MDLRS
data model provide guidelines for representing such data in
GIS-T databases (Dueker and Butler 1998, Adams et al.
2001).
 Annals of GIS
3.2. GIS-T as an analysis and modeling environment
Transportation covers a broad range of application areas
from transportation planning and design, transportation
operation and management, transportation safety and secur-
ity, environmental impact assessment, intelligent transpor-
tation systems (ITS), to transportation logistics. Each of
these application areas has developed specific analysis and
modeling procedures to meet their needs. For example, the
conventional four-step travel demand analysis covers meth-
ods such as regression analysis, spatial interaction models,
multinomial logit models, and equilibrium flow assignment
(Shaw 1993). More recent activity-based travel demand
analysis employs simulation models. Miller (1999) dis-
cusses the benefits of building closer linkages between
spatial analysis and GIS-T. He reviews four specific spatial
analytical issues of modifiable areal units, boundary pro-
blems and spatial sampling, spatial dependence and spatial
heterogeneity, and alternative representations of geographic
environments. It is evident that transportation can benefit
from innovative uses of GIS spatial analysis and modeling
capabilities. For example, we can assess the effects of
modifiable areal units on different configurations of TAZ
to derive a more representative TAZ configuration for travel
demand analysis. Alternatively, we could throw away the
aggregate approach of TAZ and develop a disaggregate
microsimulation model for travel demand analysis4 (Miller
and Shaw 2001).
As GIS are developed to support a wide range of appli-
cation domains, specific analysis and modeling procedures
needed in transportation are often not available in GIS soft-
ware. Integration of GIS with various analysis and modeling
environments has been an important GIS research topic
(Goodchild 1987, 1991, Burrough 1990). Integration of
GIS with transportation analysis and modeling also has
been pursued for many years (Nyerges and Dueker 1988,
Lewis 1990). There are different alternatives of linking GIS
with transportation models. One approach is to keep GIS
and transportation models as two separate systems and
loosely couple them together via data exchanges. Another
approach, known as tight or close coupling, is to develop an
interface that hides data transfers between GIS and trans-
portation models from the users. A full integration handles
data for both GIS and transportation models internally
within one system. There have been implementations of
all of the above approaches over the years. With the recent
trend of moving toward an open development environment,
it has become easier to integrate transportation analysis and
modeling with GIS.
A review of the GIS-T literature shows many examples
of using GIS as an analysis and modeling environment for
transportation studies. Accessibility analysis is one of the
4
TRANSIMS (Transportation Analysis and Simulation System) is an example of microsimulation approach for travel demand analysis that
was originally developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In 2006, LANL and US Federal Highway Administration
(FHWA) released versions of TRANSIMS as open source resources. For additional information, visit http://www.transims-opensource.net/.
135
successful application areas (e.g., Arentze et al. 1994,
Geertman and van Eck 1995, de Jong and van Eck 1996,
Kwan 1999, van Eck and de Jong 1999, Miller and Wu
2000, Weber and Kwan 2002, Yang et al. 2006). An
ArcView-based Accessibility Analyst extension was devel-
oped by Liu and Zhu (2004) that supports data preparation,
O-D matrix formulation, accessibility measurement, and
visualization. Examples of using GIS in other transportation
analysis and modeling studies include integration of GIS,
simulation models and visualization in traffic impact analy-
sis (Wang 2005), GIS tools for exploring household activ-
ity/travel behavior (Buliung and Kanaroglou 2006),
modeling urban transportation emissions with GIS
(Armstrong and Khan 2004), GIS-based spatial decision
support system for selecting the least-cost bioenergy facility
locations (Panichelli and Gnansounou 2008) and for routing
oversize/overweight vehicles (Ray 2007), and space–time
GIS for analyzing individual activity patterns and interac-
tions (Frihida et al. 2004, Shaw et al. 2008, Yu and Shaw
2008).
3.3. GIS-T as a communication tool
In addition to using GIS-T as spatial databases and for
analysis and modeling, it is equally important to make
GIS-T available to policy-makers and the public as a com-
munication tool. Transportation agencies are often required
by laws and regulations to seek public input. For example,
Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and state
Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in the United
States are required by the federal legislation of the Safe,
Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity
Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) to have public
involvements in creating transportation improvement pro-
grams (TIPs) at both the project planning and project pro-
gramming stages. Nyerges et al. (2006) propose an Internet
system that combines GIS, decision modeling technology,
and communications technology into a geospatial portal to
support analytic-deliberative public participation process
for TIPs. Zhong et al. (2008) also develop a web-based
public participation GIS (PPGIS) that can describe values
and concerns, determine criteria, review projects, evaluate
scenarios, and generate reports for transportation improve-
ment programming. These PPGIS serve as useful commu-
nication tools between transportation planners, analysts,
policy-makers, and the public.
Many other web-based GIS-T applications also have
been developed to disseminate transportation system and
traffic information. For example, the SmartTraveler website
(http://www.smart-traveler.info/index.html) provides free
current traffic, weather, and other travel-related information
136 S.-L. Shaw
to the public. Users can interactively browse relevant infor-
mation in a map format, as real-time traffic camera images
or as texts. These are the products of combining ITS, GIS,
and the Internet for useful transportation applications. Web-
based GIS-T data sharing and data dissemination methods
serve as an important foundation for supporting such GIS-T
applications. Research has been conducted to improve these
methods in areas such as sharing data without data confla-
tion and exchanging data in real time at the feature level
over the Internet (Peng 2005).
This section reviews the static past of GIS-T based on
GIS-T as a spatial database, GIS-T as an analysis and mod-
eling environment, and GIS-T as a communication tool. It is
evident that significant progress has been made in GIS-T
over the past few decades. New GIS data models have been
developed for transportation and, in the meantime, GIS
have been used in various transportation applications.
These outcomes reflect very well the above-mentioned
two complementary approaches that benefit both GIS and
transportation communities. On the other hand, if we look at
the past GIS-T developments closely, we also notice that
they appear to have stayed within the boundaries of each
respective field. In other words, the GIS side appears to try
to accommodate the practices that already existed in the
transportation field and the transportation side seems to
limit its applications to the existing GIS capabilities. The
two fields did not really challenge each other to come up
with ‘grand’ breakthroughs. Batty suggests that the ‘G’ in
geographic information science is interpreted by most GIS-
T researchers as ‘the geography of locations not relations’
(Batty 2003, p. 2). As a result, GIS are unable to embrace
spatial relations and interactions. He argues that ‘The
rapidly developing science of network is predicated not on
the representation of static structures per se but on processes
of change occurring on and within such structures’ (Batty
2003, p. 2). This argument is not new to either the transpor-
tation community or the GIS community. Both communities
have been aware that they need to work with changes and
processes. The challenge lies in how we can develop grand
solutions to the dynamic future of GIS-T.
4. Dynamic future of GIS-T
A review of the seven grand challenges in transportation
identified by the TRB ABJ60 committee indicates that these
challenges have been in existence for years if not longer.
Security may be the only challenge that did not receive as
much attention in the GIS and the transportation commu-
nities before the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. The
GIS-T community has worked on the challenges such as
operations and congestion, planning and programming,
infrastructure renewal and asset management, safety, and
5
For additional information about the WA-Trans project, readers can visit the project website at http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/mapsdata/
TransFramework/default.htm
environment for quite a while. For example, the research
and development needs identified by the TRB ABJ60
Committee for ‘data integration’ under the grand challenge
of infrastructure renewal and asset management suggest the
following:
‘Data integration. Spatial data collected about infrastruc-
ture can come from a wide range of sources and exist in a
wide range of formats. In addition, infrastructure data can be
combined with other operational performance data
(e.g., traffic flows) to improve forecasting of infrastructure
lifespan and renewal cycles. Required are methods for inte-
grating these diverse spatial data’. (US TRB 2007, p. 4)
The GIS-T community has been working on this chal-
lenge for decades as discussed in the previous section. For
example, the MDLRS data model developed by the NCHRP
20–27(3) project and the enterprise GIS-T data model pro-
posed by Dueker and Butler are aimed at data integration and
data sharing. Many data standards and specifications such as
the Geographic Data Files (GDF), the Spatial Data Transfer
Standards (SDTS), the National Spatial Data Infrastructure
(NSDI) Framework Transportation Identification Standard,
the Digital Geographic Information Exchange Standard
(DIGEST), and the Canadian Geomatics Interchange
Standard – Spatial Archive and Interchange Format (CGIS-
SAIF) also have been developed to facilitate data sharing and
data integration (Adams et al. 2001). An unfortunate reality is
that we have not been very successful in achieving GIS-T
data sharing and data integration. Several state DOTs in the
United States have ongoing projects on data sharing and data
integration. For example, the Washington State
Transportation Framework for GIS (WA-Trans) project is to
build a statewide transportation database covering roads,
railways, ferries, aviation, ports, and non-motorized transpor-
tation infrastructure for applications ranging from emergency
management and homeland security to transportation func-
tions to environmental analysis and management.5 Why is
the GIS-T community still working on the same challenges
after all of these years? What are preventing us from making
more significant progress on these challenges than what we
have accomplished? Do we need to look at these challenges
from a different perspective (i.e., think beyond the current
boundaries of GIS and transportation fields) to come up with
major breakthroughs? These are some questions that are
worthy of discussions in the GIS-T community.
In the meantime, we also should pay attention to the new
aspects of GIS-T challenges that we face today. As sug-
gested by the time–space concept of a shrinking and shri-
veling world discussed above, GIS-T challenges are
influenced by the new technologies that transform the
ways people carry out their activities and the abilities to
collect, analyze, and share data. Deployments of ITS since
 Annals of GIS
the 1990s have installed many traffic-monitoring devices
that provide real-time traffic data. Modern information and
communication technologies (ICT) such as the Internet and
mobile phones have introduced important changes to how
human societies and individual people function6 (Shaw and
Yu 2009). For example, mobile phones free up people from
the fixed locations of landline phones. We therefore have
gained additional spatial and temporal flexibilities of arran-
ging our activities while staying in touch with other people
through mobile phones. We can search for a journal article
or purchase a book online during the hours when libraries
and bookstores are closed. These changing human activity
patterns in turn can lead to changes in passenger travel and
freight shipment patterns. Modern ICT have clearly made
our world more dynamic!
Although transportation researchers have incorporated
the concept of time in their studies (e.g., travel time as an
impedance measure in network analysis, studies of time use
in activity-based travel demand analysis), time has not
received appropriate attention in transportation research
especially with respect to modeling and analysis of move-
ments, interactions, changes, and processes in a space-and-
time context (Shaw 2006). With the location-aware technol-
ogies such as the global positioning system (GPS), mobile
phone tracking, Wi-Fi positioning system, and radio-
frequency identification (RFID) that are available today, it
is feasible and affordable to track individual persons, vehi-
cles, freight shipments, and other moving objects across
space and over time. Google Latitude (http://www.google.
com/latitude/intro.html) that allows friends to share their
locations in real time and Sense Network’s application
such as the Citysense and the CabSense that show real-
time activity hotspots and the best corner to catch a taxi
(http://www.sensenetworks.com/) are some examples of
using dynamic spatiotemporal tracking data to develop use-
ful applications. As an increasing number of people who are
willing to share their data, we also have observed a growing
community of volunteered geographic information (VGI)
using modern ICT (Goodchild 2007). Individual travelers
therefore could become mobile sensors who contribute to
real-time traffic information via their mobile devices. Such
real-time monitoring and tracking data, along with other
relevant data such as phone logs and web browser logs,
provide unprecedented opportunities for the GIS-T commu-
nity to think outside the boundaries of current practices in
GIS and transportation communities. One example could be
using the tracking and monitoring data to develop innova-
tive GIS-T studies such that we can gain insights into the
changing human activity/travel behavior and freight move-
ment patterns. Such understanding in turn can help us
design more efficient and effective traffic management stra-
tegies to alleviate congestion or develop new disaggregate
There exists a large amount of literature related to ICT. The ‘ICT: Mobilizing peoples, places and spaces’ website (http://www.geo.uu.nl/
6
mobilizingict/index.php) serves as a good entry point.
137
and dynamic modeling and analysis approaches that depart
from the aggregate and static approaches we have been
using for many decades.
One major challenge we are facing in GIS-T today is how
we can develop temporal GIS for dynamic transportation
research and applications that can better represent and
model dynamic movements, interactions, changes, and pro-
cesses. Although temporal GIS research began two decades
ago and progress has been made over the years (e.g., Langran
1989, 1992, Peuquet 1994, 2002, Peuquet and Duan 1995,
Yuan 1999, Goodchild et al. 2007), current GIS data models
are basically static in nature. We need operational GIS data
models that can represent, query, analyze, and visualize the
dynamic aspects of transportation challenges. Some specific
temporal GIS approaches for transportation have been devel-
oped in recent years. For example, Makin et al. (1997)
implement the constraints concept of time geography in an
object-oriented GIS to simulate individual shopping beha-
vior. Frihida et al. (2002) develop an object-oriented spatio-
temporal GIS data model for disaggregate travel behavior.
One of the study’s objectives is to detect, depict, and classify
individual and group space–time dynamics. Shaw and Xin
(2003) present a temporal GIS design that offers exploratory
analysis capabilities for interactive investigation of land use
and transportation interactions at user-specified spatial and
temporal scales. Much progress also has been made on the
development of space–time GIS based on Hägerstrand’s time
geography to study individual activity patterns (e.g., Miller
1991, Kwan 2000, Frihida et al. 2004, Kwan and Lee 2004,
Buliung and Kanaroglou 2006, Yu 2006, Neutens et al. 2007,
Shaw and Yu 2009). A combination of time geography, GIS,
and individual tracking data opens up new possibilities of
examining the dynamic interactions between human activ-
ities, transportation systems, and traffic patterns in a space–
time context. These dynamic interactions can be used to
either analyze individual spatiotemporal activity patterns or
to derive aggregate spatiotemporal patterns and trends (Shaw
et al. 2008, Yu and Shaw 2008).
In addition to time geography-based GIS developments,
there also has been active research in the representation,
query, and analysis of moving objects for dynamic and
mobile GIS (Bian 2000, Vazirgiannis and Wolfson 2001,
Brinkhoff 2004, Hornsby and Egenhofer 2004, de Almeida
and Guting 2005, Laube et al. 2005, Nanni and Pedreschi
2006, Drummond et al. 2007). Li and Lin (2006) develop a
topology-based mixed index structure to index network-
constrained trajectory data of moving objects for
connectivity-based queries. Hornsby and Cole (2007) pre-
sent an event-based approach for abstracting movement
patterns based on event sequences. Huang et al. (2007)
develop a dynamic shortest path algorithm based on the
Lifelong Planning A* algorithm to find the shortest path
138 S.-L. Shaw
between a moving object and its destination by continually
adapting to dynamic traffic conditions. Progress made in
time geography-based GIS and in GIS for moving objects
clearly is moving away from the traditional aggregate and
static approach and toward a disaggregate and dynamic
approach. For dynamic GIS-T, we again can consider it as
a spatiotemporal database, as a spatiotemporal analysis and
modeling environment, and as a spatiotemporal communi-
cation tool. Developing dynamic GIS-T, however, is far
more complex and challenging than simply adding time as
an additional attribute data field in GIS databases. Time
must be integrated with the spatial dimensions to support
spatiotemporal analysis and modeling. More importantly,
dynamic GIS-T must be able to meet the needs of analyzing
and modeling movements, interactions, changes, and pro-
cesses in transportation studies if we want the ‘G’ in GIS-T
means more than ‘the geography of location’ as challenged
by Batty (2003).
5. Conclusions
Active GIS-T research and application activities have been
carried out since the 1980s and flourished in the 1990s. At the
dawn of the twenty-first century, it was well justified to
declare that GIS-T had arrived. GIS-T continued to move
forward in the 2000s. A review of the past GIS-T develop-
ments indicates that progress has been made in areas of using
GIS-T as spatial databases, as analysis and modeling tools,
and as communication tools. Nevertheless, these GIS-T
developments appear to have occurred within the existing
boundaries of GIS and transportation fields. The snapshot
map layers approach and the conventional GIS data models
kept the past GIS-T developments static in nature. Most of
the past GIS-T accomplishments used GIS technologies to
solve the transportation problems with the traditional
approaches. For example, the concepts of dynamic segmen-
tation, turn table, and O-D matrix all support the current
data and analysis procedures that had been used in the
transportation fields before the GIS era. In other words,
we made it possible to represent and analyze different
types of transportation data in a GIS environment, but con-
tributions of GIS-T to creating innovative ways of tackling
transportation challenges have been somewhat limited.
As our world moves into a more dynamic era because of
the widespread adoption of the Internet, mobile phones, and
location-aware technologies, GIS-T must adjust accord-
ingly. Both the transportation side and the GIS side of
GIS-T face challenges of dealing with the dynamic nature
of transportation issues. In fact, movements, interactions,
changes, and processes have always been subjects of trans-
portation studies. They are not new challenges. It is simply
that we were unable to (or failed to) tackle these challenges
from a dynamic perspective in the past because of the
limitations in data collection and spatiotemporal analysis
and modeling capabilities. With the recent technological
advancements that have at least partially overcome some
of these limitations, it is time for the GIS-T community to
tackle congestion, infrastructure renewal, environmental
impact, transportation planning, and many other transporta-
tion issues as dynamic processes rather than static snap-
shots. It may be beneficial to consider transportation and
GIS as T-GIS implying both transportation GIS and tem-
poral GIS that collectively can better address the grand
transportation challenges in today’s dynamic world!
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