Inaugural Editorial: Digital Transportation and Safety

Transportation is essential to human life and a significant component of a modern economy and societal development. Since its first emergence approximately 5,000 years ago, transportation has experienced evolutionary changes from ancient horse-pulled wagons and dog-pulled sleds to modern airplane and high-speed trains, to future supersonic jets and space shuttles. Since the late 20^th century, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have been developed for improving transportation efficiency, alleviating traffic congestion, increasing roadway, air and sea transportation capacity, reducing energy consumption, and mitigating environmental pollution.

Digital transportation provides a synthetic and interacted modern ITS and is a significant field of digital economy development, centered around big data as a critical factor and core driver to promote transportation activities in both physical and virtual space. With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, massive data generation, cloud computing and communication technologies, digital transportation has become indispensable to infrastructure reconstruction and a prerequisite in developing Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) and Internet of Things (IoTs).

Whether under conventional transportation systems or in the environment of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), or in the digital transportation system, safety is always the deciding consideration for implementation of any new transportation system. Safe transportation is the critical factor for protecting individual life and property, even national treasures and homeland security, which may not only impact traffic order and capacity, but also under safe traffic conditions, transportation capacity and efficiency can be maximized.

However, by comparing the current research on ITS and safety, few academic journals have integrated ITS with safety, whereas the current transportation-related journals are mainly focused on one field. This calls for a professional journal with focus on both areas and integration of both types of research. We are pleased to launch Digital Transportation and Safety (DTS) to fill this gap. This journal aims to become a rigorously peer-reviewed, flagship international journal, covering research on the following, but not limited to: ITS, smart transportation, massive data-driven traffic and transportation, IoVs/IoTs, CAVs, autonomous vehicles (AVs), human-vehicle-road coordination control, transport resilience, communication and emerging technologies in transportation, technological, economic, behavioral, educational, physiological, legal theoretical and empirical implementation in transportation safety and safety planning/design/control and management under conventional and CAV environments. DTS will publish high-quality original research, reviews, perspectives, and opinions in the open access mode under the CC BY License (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License) with support for fast submission, review and free dissemination to the global research community.

We deeply appreciate the experts and scholars who are engaged in digital transportation and safety research for devoting their time to unselfishly serve the advisory and editorial boards, and Maximum Academic Press (MAP) (www.maxapress.com) for publishing the journal. Support from the community is welcomed by the contribution of high quality papers, rigorous review of papers and promotion of the journal to the community. With your support, this journal will become a leading journal in the digital transportation and safety area to publish and disseminate the latest discoveries, to promote cooperation, collaboration, and communication for achieving a global environmentally green, safe, smart, low-carbon and sustainable transportation environment.