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ADMINISTRATION: Investigating The Investigators
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Getting 'Intelligent' About Transportation
by Aliya Sternstein
While driving to the office, Tom hears a broadcast through his car speakers telling him to switch lanes because there is a slow-moving truck six cars in front of him. A few minutes later, his car halts after sensing that a vehicle at an intersection beyond his sightline is about to run a red light. Upon entering the office parking garage, the car tells Tom that his favorite space is taken, but there is an empty one close to the garage elevators in the second row of the third level. That Jetson-like scenario could be typical traffic control in 2030, if all goes according to the Transportation Department's vision. But such a scheme will require aligning the sometimes antagonistic interests of automakers, lawmakers, states, the satellite-based industry, traffic data suppliers and many others. "The big challenge is how to get such a broad partnership to succeed when each partner has its own objectives it would like to achieve," said Jerry Werner, who has been a consultant for "intelligent transportation systems," known by the shorthand ITS, for 16 years. Federal officials help by facilitating data and technology standards to ensure compatibility across jurisdictions. And they are. "The question is, how do you get that data to the driver," said Paul Brubaker, the head of Transportation's Research and Innovative Technology Administration. Overcoming Politics And Spotty Data To address the predicament, Transportation has embarked on a field test called SafeTrip-21 that will use ITS to fight congestion and reduce traffic-related fatalities and injuries. In December, Transportation requested proposals from companies, researchers, and state and local governments about commercially available tools that can be deployed for the test. The experiment will launch at the 2008 ITS World Congress in New York City. Navigational tools, safety warnings and traffic information are part of the vision. "Some basic capability will be rolled out nationwide within five years," Brubaker said. "To the extent that we are going to require infrastructure investment, that will require state and local governments to take charge," as well as the private sector to replace all the cars on the road. "Ubiquity for that is 20 years away," he added. The plan depends on widespread access to updated data about carbon emissions, incidents, parking, speed, transit options, weather conditions and various other traffic indicators. But the live data that is available is "spotty," said David Zavattero, deputy director of Chicago's emergency management and communications office and chairman of a policy forum within ITS America. Much of the technology is ready to go, he said, but the information is not comparable -- or if it is, it's not being shared. There have been allegations that Transportation is subsidizing a monopoly on real-time traffic data by contracting with Traffic.com since 1999. Under the partnership, Traffic.com offers citizens free online access to basic traffic data and gives government agencies higher-level data. Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, to open the program to competition, but Hatch said Transportation's implementation of the language has ignored its intent and continues to benefit a single company. "As it is now, what is essentially a government-subsidized ITS monopoly has restricted healthy competition, done a disservice to users of our highways, and worked against the public good." Traffic.com officials responded that the government's original contract solicitation and a recent solicitation to continue the program were designed to identify companies that could provide superior data quality and broad access. The EBay Of The Transportation Sector Transportation officials said the Federal Highway Administration continues to work with Traffic.com because Congress specifically directed the agency to do so. Officials added that the government is part of a coalition that just began working with another traffic information company, Inrix, to collect multistate data along the I-95 Corridor along the East Coast. Part of the problem, Zavattero said, is that companies today do not see a financial benefit to exchanging traffic-related information. "Until we can solve this business model conundrum," he said, "we won't have the ability to share this data between the public and private entities to develop products that can make these services available." One option he suggests is a shared pool of information from all entities, with the data bartered. Groups that supply data to the pool could set minimum values for each contribution, similar to the way sellers auction items on the eBay Web site. Under the traffic concept, dubbed dBay, users would compensate data suppliers by either trading data or buying it from others. Over time, supply and demand would create a market value for the data. The mechanism would treat traffic-related data as a public good rather than a monopoly, according to Zavattero. But Traffic.com officials doubt that the auction model can deliver the stringent quality levels required to make traffic data meaningful. Aside from supplying the data, they said, there is the task of applying the data throughout the transportation infrastructure. "That's expensive," ITS consultant Werner said. Deployment will require collaboration among the federal government and state transportation departments. And the private sector would be increasingly asked to devise sensors for roads and communications devices for cars. In addition to traveler information systems, technology-based road pricing could be utilized to reduce congestion. Already, Oregon has tried having vehicles pay electronically for each mile driven, rather than charging fuel taxes, to fund transportation development. The state equipped some vehicles in the Portland area with global positioning systems that record mileage data and transmit the information to devices on gas pumps at service stations. But much of the strategy involves putting a new crop of computerized cars on the road. "Retrofitting this type of GPS unit to 200 million vehicles in the existing fleet is unworkable," Reason Foundation founder Bob Poole wrote in his e-newsletter, "Surface Transportation Innovations." "That means something like a 20-year transition period -- since that's about how long it takes for 95 percent or more of the fleet to turn over." Roads vs. Technology Other countries like Japan and Korea are years ahead of the United States in ITS deployment, largely because they have proactive governments, noted Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and chairman of the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission. "Our transportation politics is pretty much stymied by a lot of interest groups." There is a huge debate among conservatives who want states to manage transportation and liberals who believe privatization is anathema, Atkinson said. Werner noted, "For years, there's kind of been a fight between the people who want to build roads and those who want to build technology into existing roads." The American Road and Transportation Builders Association supports a broad range of solutions to combat congestion. "Our only opposition is to looking at any of these solutions as an either/or proposition," Public Affairs Director Jeff Solsby said. "We think there should be new funding, technology and public-private partnerships." The Bush administration maintains that modernizing the roadways is a matter of focus, commitment and leadership. "There is a sense of urgency here," Brubaker noted, adding that the end of the president's term is nearing. "We believe that this is kind of overdue in terms of the ability to demonstrate this." | ||||||||||||||
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