Smarter Cities (page 42) in the September 2011 issue of Scientific American does a good job of explaining crowd sourcing in Transportation context and comparing it to infrastructure based approach, “An ideal beginning is to leverage the growing array of smart personal devices we all weild and recruit people as the sensors of a city rather than relying on formal systems embedded into infrastructure. The traffic function on Google Maps is a good example. Instead of building a costly network of dedicated vehicle sensors along roadways…”.
This approach is very consistent with my previous experience of handling traffic congestion issues, especially those with a strong freight component to it, since the freight traffic often has a regulatory mechanism that is easier to interface with compared to passenger traffic. This YouTube video does a good job of explaining that. ITS has come a long way for cities, but many many more improvements can be made, if some more decisions can be made dynamically, as this paper explores.