America's roadways generate more operational data every second than at any point in history — from signal controllers and roadside sensors to connected vehicles and freight telematics. Yet the overwhelming majority of that data remains locked inside proprietary, vendor-specific systems that cannot speak to one another. The result is a national paradox: unprecedented instrumentation of the physical roadway, paired with chronic data fragmentation that slows safety response, inflates procurement costs, and stalls the deployment of automated and electric vehicle technologies at scale.

This white paper presents the business and policy thesis behind Vikasa.io, an open-source transportation data fabric designed to free roadway data from closed systems and let it flow as shared, standards-aligned streams that agencies, vendors, and developers can build on together.

Vikasa's architecture — an interoperability layer built on the open OpenITS vocabulary, a NATS/JetStream telemetry backbone, and a GitOps-managed security and identity layer — is engineered specifically to solve the interoperability deficit that has quietly become the single largest structural barrier to American leadership in automated vehicles (AVs), electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure, and connected-vehicle (V2X) safety systems.

The paper argues four points:

1. Open data infrastructure is not a nice-to-have; it is a prerequisite. Automated and electric vehicles cannot scale nationally on a patchwork of proprietary, agency-by-agency data silos any more than the internet could have scaled on incompatible private networks.

2. The economics favor openness. Precedent from open transportation data standards — most notably the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) — and independent economic analysis of open data show that shared, standards-based data consistently outperforms closed, proprietary alternatives on cost, innovation velocity, and public value (McKinsey Global Institute; Beyond Transparency: The GTFS Story).

3. Federal policy is already moving this direction — but infrastructure has not caught up. The National ITS Architecture's vendor-neutral standards program (USDOT ITS JPO) has, for three decades, pointed toward the same conclusion: interoperability must be engineered in, not bolted on. Vikasa is the missing implementation layer that turns that policy intent into operational reality.

4. Institutional reform, not just technology, is the binding constraint. The shift from proprietary systems to shared streams requires new procurement language, new governance models, and a redefinition of what agencies own versus what they license — reforms this paper outlines in detail.

We close with a phased roadmap for agency adoption and a governance model designed to keep the core of Vikasa open, agencies in control of their own data, and vendors competing on value rather than on lock-in.

Click here to read the white paper