RDS-ALERT: a DRIVE project to develop a proposed standard for the Traffic Message Channel feature of the radio data system RDS

RDS-ALERT (Radio Data System-Advice and Problem Location for European Road Traffic) is a project within the European Community´s DRIVE research programme. The main goal of this project is to develop, and build European consensus upon, a draft standard for broadcasting traffic messages in densely coded digital form via the proposed Traffic Message Channel (TMC) feature of the radio data system RDS. The author outlines the background to this project, including the existing and proposed capabilities of RDS to assist traffic information broadcasting and gives a brief report on the progress to date