 This is the music of a mobile society, a graceful symphony of motion and movement, power and productivity. America's transportation system has helped move the country through a century of progress and expansion, but now it is straining under the weight of its own success. The music is fading. Today, congestion and inefficiency threaten the social and economic prosperity of our communities. That's why improving our transportation system is now one of America's highest priorities. If you think about what's important in the city, whether it's employment, whether it's being able to participate in cultural activities, whether it's education, whether it's family activities, transportation goes into every last one of those functions. Transportation is linked directly to the issues that most concern our citizens. How we keep our streets and neighborhoods safe, improve the air we breathe, sustain a healthy, satisfying life, and maintain a strong, vibrant economy. Every encounter that we have in economic development is somewhere or another. We have to deal with how we are managing transportation and I'm convinced that the jurisdictions who are not able to show good traffic management are probably going to be at a competitive disadvantage. I think increasingly everybody in transportation realizes that we cannot continue to build more and more miles of roadway and that we need to find ways to get more out of our system. So I think they're coming online and realizing that we need to draw on technology. Local governments are drawing on technology to stretch their limited resources. Now they're learning to apply advanced information technologies to transportation. These intelligent transportation systems enable them to respond quickly to emergencies, manage traffic and transit, electronically collect toll and fare payments, and inform travelers of transportation options. While many communities already have these systems in place, the full potential of these technologies will not be realized until they are interconnected. This integrated approach is known as the Intelligent Transportation Infrastructure, also called ITI. It's an electronic network for surface transportation. It's about sharing information and it's done by integrating technologies locally, across agencies and regionally throughout neighboring jurisdictions. Today we'll look at the smart moves made by three of America's forward-thinking local governments as they move forward with the process of building the intelligent transportation infrastructure. The City of Phoenix has a strong tradition of applying technology to transportation. Now they're leading the way with a new program to help employees of local companies make better use of public transit. Buscard Plus is an interesting program because it's a program that started small and grew to be even better. Initially we were looking for a way for employers to help to pay for transit rides to encourage more employees to ride the bus. So we created our own credit card that could be swiped inside of the bus and at the end of the month the City could bill employers for the rides that their employees took on our bus system and it worked great. The employees loved it, the business loved it, so then we asked ourselves could we make it even better. So today in our buses we've expanded the system so that you can take your visa card out of your pocket, walk on to a city bus, swipe your visa card by it and you'll be billed for your bus ride at the end of the month. It's a simple thing, it's these kinds of small things sometimes that makes ITI so important. Technology moves awfully fast and that's the key and one of the things we must stay focused on in terms of building this infrastructure is that we build it in a fashion that provides for future flexibility. The City is trying to make sure that when systems are developed by various departments they will use the same standards so that they can be interconnected, share information and share common database. Chicago's new state-of-the-art 911 system is an excellent example of that philosophy. Here the City has developed a massive database that identifies more than 40,000 street segments and alleys, the locations of fire hydrants and footprints of almost a million buildings. Our 911 system is part of the ITI infrastructure because it's important that that automobile or that ambulance or that fire truck is able to get from its location to where it's needed as quickly as possible. Chicago's 911 system is proof that this infrastructure transcends the traditional boundaries of traffic and transit and it will pay big dividends for public safety as the City moves to integrate it with transportation. By using that technology we can hopefully keep those routes open. We can pre-empt signals. We can change our traffic signal system to allow traffic to move out of the way of that emergency vehicle. So potentially it's a tremendous tool to move traffic and to respond to emergency conditions as they occur in the City. Montgomery County, Maryland is a large suburban community adjacent to Washington DC. Here we can see the infrastructure taking shape as the County moves forward with the integration of their intelligent transportation systems. This is the location in Montgomery County where we keep track of what's happening on the road network throughout the county using a variety of surveillance methods. We have about 750 intersections where we have centrally controlled signals out of this center and about 30 of those now and we have actual video so we can bring back live video of what's happening there. We also have 250 buses out on the system or in the process of loading them up with GPS equipment but they already have radios. They can feed back information on conditions on a system. And then probably the most significant breakthrough that we've made is now we're taking that information, packaging it in a way that our citizens can use to make travel decisions. And we in fact broadcast those video pictures from the intersections live on our cable channel for the county. Additionally we have that information on the internet. You can dial us up on the internet, plug into a particular intersection that you want to travel through and determine what conditions are there. So really we're involved in three things here. One is management and the provision of information to citizens. Success depends on the ability to share information with neighboring jurisdictions. A goal that requires a high level of cooperation between local, regional and state governments. Cooperation is tough. I think what it takes is leadership at the top both regionally and locally. So it means that mayors have to send the message to their staffs that this sort of cooperation is necessary and that needs to be sent at the state level and at the federal level. And it means targeting dollars and using dollars wisely by having regions, cities, metropolitan areas cooperate to make the best use of the dollars that are available. With that cooperation communities will realize the full benefits of the intelligent transportation infrastructure, reduce congestion, better choices, faster emergency response, cleaner air, stronger economies and an improved quality of life. These are smart moves and proof that by planning smart and buying smart governments can stretch their resources and better serve their citizens.