GPS

The movement of goods, services, and people across the United States and global transportation infrastructure have evolved tremendously over the past two decades, due in part to technological advancements and the commercial and civilian availability of the Global Positioning System (GPS).

The GPS, a U.S.-owned utility, is a dual-use, satellite-based system that provides accurate positioning, navigation, and timing services to users around the world. While GPS was at one time only used by the U.S. military and defense support agencies, free and open access to GPS data by the civilian sector and commercial industry has significantly changed the landscape of the global information and transportation infrastructure—improving the way people and goods are moved around the globe.

Development of the GPS began in 1973 under the U.S. Department of Defense to support critical military operations but did not gain full operational capability until early 1995. In 1996, President Bill Clinton established GPS as a dual-use system to support both U.S. military and civilian applications, signing the U.S. Global Positioning System Policy on March 29 of that year.

The policy established the GPS as a national asset and opened its use to the civilian and commercial sectors. One of the major goals of this policy was to promote the safety and efficiency of the U.S. transportation sector, influencing how the transportation infrastructure was developed and used.

In 1998, Vice President Al Gore announced a series of modernization efforts to improve the performance of GPS data provided to civilians and commercial industry partners, including increasing the availability and responsiveness of the system. By 2000, President Clinton, with authorization from the U.S. Congress, announced the decision to stop degrading the accuracy of GPS data for civilian use, making the location data up to 10 times more accurate.

This measure signaled the United States' last formal policy step in the modernization initiative, thereby ensuring private-sector investment into GPS services and technological advancements and encouraging civil, scientific, and commercial users' integration of GPS data into their applications for use by the public.