Indirect Benefits of ITS Projects in China

Economic evaluations on the transportation projects have been focused on the direct benefits in the past decades. However, the indirect benefits linked with the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are always greater than the direct ones. This is due to the fact that ITS is a radical innovation from the traditional transportation system, which internally has a different mechanism in the indirect benefits aspect. In order to demonstrate that ITS has a tangible distinction from the traditional transportation system at the impact on different industrial sectors and regional economic development, this study used the classic input-output theory and calculated the power of dispersion coefficient and sensitivity of dispersion coefficient of ITS based on an new integration with the related sectors using China as a case study. The results show that ITS relevant industries have a higher sensitivity and impact than the average level of all the industries in the economic sectors. We also found that all kinds of benefits from ITS are considerable, including direct benefits, backward multiplier benefits, forwarding multiplier benefits and consumer multiplier benefits, among them, indirect benefits are more evident.