Building the Bridge Between ITS

On Nov. 5, 1998, an armed man climbed onto the railing of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge crossing the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia. For the next five hours, he held police at bay until he ultimately plunged into the river and was rescued.

This incident tied up the Capital Beltway—I-495—for hours, causing traffic backups of up to 20 miles. Police, fire, emergency medical service and transportation officials from the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia and several federal agencies responded, as the resulting traffic problems affected many other agencies and jurisdictions throughout the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

It was clear that all these agencies had no effective way to communicate and coordinate with each other. And this wasn’t an isolated incident in that respect. Numerous other multi-state and multi-jurisdictional critical incidents have occurred in the Washington, D.C., area in recent years, along with many other traffic-related incidents around the nation, with an equally maddening need for better exchange of information between transportation, law enforcement and medical agencies.

But that bridge event was a glaring example of what transportation mavens, along with public safety and other officials, are coming increasingly to realize: interoperability between traffic systems, both in a technical equipment and a human institutional way, not to mention integration of their operations, is sorely lacking. The systems must be fashioned so they can work together in the interest of saving lives, time and money, these officials say.

“The concept of interoperability is really integral to what we’ve been talking about ITS over the past five years—different agencies being able to talk to each other despite having different kinds of equipment,” said John Corbin, a traffic engineer with the Wisconsin DOT.

So a wide range of major cooperative projects, with interoperability a leading objective, have been launched. And more and more ITS leaders are showing an interest in making the necessary highway infrastructure, computer hardware, software, data and voice linkage and other matches that are necessary to reach that goal.

They are making progress in laying the groundwork for a truly interoperable network of systems, in some cases even getting interoperability launched or improved in some segments of their operations.

A national task force on interoperability planned a series of meetings starting in April, with the aim of defining a national action plan that would help more aggressively move along the development of interoperable communications networks. The U.S. DOT is working to spur the process along by providing funding and encouragement for writing and updating of standards covering the various segments of ITS—from ETC to dynamic message signs to traffic management.

For example, Jeffrey Paniati, program manager for the DOT’s ITS Joint Program Office, said, “We’re trying to work toward where you would be able to buy a message sign from various vendors and sort of plug and play.”

Interoperability getting there

Most everyone agrees that achieving anything like full-scale interoperability is far from at hand, with numerous roadblocks along the route.

“We’ve come a long way. Are we done? No way! Are we on the right path? We think so . . . I think there’s a ways to go,” said Paniati.

Though he’s working hard to help the ITS community reach that goal, David Kelley, ITS programs manager for SubCarrier Systems Corp., Covina, Calif., said that right now, “Interoperability is a pipe dream that has yet to come to fruition.”

One problem is that interoperability is still an unfamiliar concept to many transportation planners.

“It’s not a huge universe of people who have identified this as an area they’re going to work in,” said Tom Palmerlee, senior program officer at the Transportation Research Board. Another problem Palmerlee identified is that there is now “too much data,” which is overwhelming everyone.

Even so, the ITS world is endeavoring to lay those pipes between systems and realize the dream. Last June, for example, the U.S. DOT began evaluating nine innovative ITS projects from among 93 locations that receive funding under the ITS Integration Program, created by the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) “to accelerate the integration and interoperability of ITS in metropolitan and rural areas.” One of those projects is the Capital Wireless Integrated Network Demonstration Project (CapWIN) a partnership between Mary- land, Virginia and the District of Columbia, to develop an integrated transportation and criminal justice mobile wireless information network.

The project points up the need for easy sharing of traffic, road condition and other information among, say, various transportation agencies, but also a free data flow between transportation and public safety agencies. According to the CapWIN strategic plan, phase one involves development and implementation of the project’s infrastructure, including a mobile data system with message-switching functions and a message gateway to connect disparate databases and systems.

Phases two and three would include the addition of priority functionality, expansion of interfaces, system operations and maintenance to include automatic vehicle location, applying voice recognition capability for mobile client software, incident resource tracking, provision of traffic congestion data and interfaces to other transportation and public-safety databases.

Interoperability partnerships will be created among D.C.-area agencies, open architectures and standards would be identified, as required for successful integration of technology into existing law enforcement, transportation, fire and emergency medical services. The wireless information network would later be expanded to serve additional agencies in the region and in other states in a regional system.

“It’s kind of as wide as your imagination,” said George Ake, the CapWIN project director. “It’s going to be real innovative, because it’s open architecture—it’s really like Internet stuff. This system builds a bridge between the systems so they can talk to each other.

“It’s a new way of doing business,” Ake said. “Different vendors make different systems that basically don’t communicate with each other. We’re solving that by putting in a gateway and with middleware.”

How far is everyone down the road to interoperability?

“Not very far at all. People are starting to realize it so badly—it’s hard to do your job when you can’t communicate with each other,” said Ake.

March toward interoperability

Among the other projects under DOT evaluation are a statewide Integrated Transportation Management System in Delaware; a merger of public and private transit resources into a bi-state, integrated, centrally dispatched operation in the South Tahoe area; integration of freeway/arterial corridor surveillance and control and regional multi-modal traveler information systems; deployment of a roadway and subsurface sensor system in Grand Forks, Neb., that can help forecast pavement conditions; de-ployment of the CargoMate Logistics Management System to track intermodal shipments at terminals and tenant facilities in the ports of New York and New Jersey; and deployment of truck safety and monitoring systems within the greater Houston area.

“New infrastructure, computer hardware, software and linkages, or new uses for old ones are playing important roles in the march toward interoperability. The Colorado DOT will base traffic speed, volume and occupancy data collection and sharing between its three traffic management centers in Denver and Colorado Springs and on the western slope of the Continental Divide partly on a fiber optic network and non-intrusive radar sensors embedded in expanded I-25 and I-225 highways in the Denver metropolitan area,” said Frank Kinder, ITS program manager. 

The DOT wants to expand use of controlled dynamic message signs, CCTV and radar detection. “As we get more devices, we see us getting into more of a traffic management role,” Kinder said.

Similarly, in one of four Congressionally mandated highway corridor projects (the other three are along I-95 on the East Coast, in Southern California and Houston), Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin transportation departments are working on the Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee corridor project, which seeks to develop a Gateway Travel Information System to provide traffic data for traffic operations centers and motorists alike. The system will use magnetic induction loops 6 ft in diam. and embedded along 150 miles of highway, every half mile, to gather traffic volume and occupancy data, which can be used to calculate vehicle speeds.

This, along with a ramp vehicle-metering system, changeable message signs, reversible lanes and HAR messages, will help agencies better manage traffic. Some of the hardware and software and data pipe are new, other components “have been around a long time,” said David Zavattero, ITS program manager for the Illinois DOT. “The ultimate goal is to have all the couple of dozen transportation agencies in the 16-county area achieve an appropriate level of interface to the Gateway system,” he said.

Interoperability between systems, and between the Gateway hub in Schaumburg, Ill., and the three state hubs will be paramount.

“The goal is to have as much (computer) automation as possible, but when we’re dealing with an agency with one engineer, or no engineer at all, their system may only be based on fax transmission,” Zavattero said.

ITS planners said a firm technical foundation is necessary, but they conceded that overcoming human institutional barriers to interoperability is probably an even more daunting task. CapWIN’s Ake has ticked off five reasons for people resisting a switch to interoperability. They include turf protection, a fear of venturing into the unknown world of technology, a sense of loss, the threat to one’s personal competence and lack of involvement in the process of change.

Robert E. Lee Jr., a Department of Justice program manager for the joint Justice-Treasury Department Public Safety Wireless Network interoperability program, said the public-safety community would like to reach more cooperation with transportation officials, but that “there is sometimes competition for funding and (airwaves) spectrum, and that competition takes away from cooperation.”  

Moving ahead on interoperability

But ITS planners are moving ahead on interoperability-minded projects, either with public safety officials or within transportation circles. For example, Smart Trek, the Model Deployment Initiative demonstration project in the Puget Sound, Wash., area unites 25 public agencies and private companies directing 27 projects designed to build upon the region’s ITS infrastructure. Through creative deployment of technology, including wireless information technology, Smart Trek’s integrated approach has resulted in roads being cleared 50% faster than before, reported Karin Haas Martin, writing on “Integrating Public Safety and Transportation Communications and Technology.”

The technology includes the advanced traffic management system, which enables traffic management staff from 19 jurisdictions to share real-time traffic information and make consistent decisions to ensure that travelers don’t encounter delays as they pass through jurisdictions. Incident response trucks equipped with video cameras allow traffic managers in control centers to assess the severity and impact of crashes. Each county is provided with 800-MHz radios to maintain contact with the Washington State DOT and state patrol in an emergency, while more than 200 CCTV monitor PS corridors give a quick view of traffic conditions.

The New York Thruway Authority is spearheading an effort to further integrate ETC, involving interoperability between states’ fare collection cards, so that any trucker or motorist doesn’t have to worry about having more than one card as they travel toll roads or about getting billed by several toll authorities.

Already, travelers, their vehicles equipped with an interoperable trans-ponder, often fixed to the outside of a window, can use one card for many states. But some, such as Virginia, still maintain a separate card for toll-road trips within their borders. Moves also are afoot to allow a trucker’s card to be used for more than toll collections—for inspection pre-clearance, truck-stop purchases and other purposes, for instance.     TME