ITS Paralysis?

There's an interesting article over at CNN Tech about the rollout of ITS in South Korea. The article contrasts the speed with which South Korea has been able to implement these systems with the sluggishness of the US and Europe. From the article:

"The U.S. is still stalled in the research phase and the ITIF report calls for a federal approach comparable in scale to the Interstate Highway System launched in the 1950s, with national real-time traffic information in the 100 largest cities by 2014 and a mileage-based user fee system by 2020.

It is ironic, then, that South Korea's traffic setup was adopted from the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, an ITS forefather pushed by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration in the early 1990s.

"The majority of experts in Korea were educated in the United States," says Hwang. "We learned from the United States but we didn't see many things practiced there.""

Some of the reasons for this quick rollout may be the lack of interfering jurisdictions at state level in the US or between countries in Europe.