Future of ITS Relies on TEA-3

Increased federal support for the still-fledgling intelligent transportation systems, including new emphasis on national security, may well be in the offing when a crucial turning point for ITS arrives next year.

Congress must enact a new multi-year funding and directional plan for ITS when the current massive highway and transit financing law known as the Transportation Equity Act for the 21^st Century, or TEA-21, expires on Sept. 30, 2003. That will present a challenge to lawmakers, and to ITS proponents seeking more federal backing, in using the TEA-21 reauthorization to decide the important course for intelligent transportation for probably the next six years.

At a May 21 hearing of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, Brent Bair, managing director of the Road Commission for Oakland County, Mich., who was the Intelligent Transportation Society of America's witness, said that the TEA-21 reauthorization will give Congress the chance to create the first "truly intelligent surface transportation system, harnessing the powers of technology to create additional efficiencies from limited capacity," rather than fruitlessly just building more roads.

Oakland County boasts the largest adaptive traffic signals system in the country--with 1,500 signals, led a Southeastern Michigan project that uses satellite technology to locate vehicles, and has a traffic preemption system that assists emergency vehicles.

When TEA-21 was enacted in 1997, succeeding the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, ISTEA, intelligent transportation was just an infant, barely learning how to walk. Now, five years later and going on six, it's still-young (only a fourth of freeway systems around major metropolitan areas are instrumented, for example), but starting to show some strength. And, the federal government, working with state and local agencies and with the ITS community, will do a lot to help decide how virile an adult ITS will become.

"It's a wonderful opportunity, but it only comes along every six years," Neil Schuster, the ITS America (ITSA) president, said in a interview with TM+E.

TEA-3 allocation questions

Whether to boost dollars allocated for the research and deployment programs that constitute the specified core of ITS funding in TEA-21, currently at a combined annual $225 million; whether to change the rules for the deployment program to reduce congressional ability to earmark the money for specific local projects; whether to also direct recipients how to use federal funds to achieve national mobility, productivity, safety and security goals, and what overall objectives should be considered are among the key questions that Congress and others will face as the deadline for the new legislation, sometimes informally called TEA-3, draws closer.

In the past five years, state transportation departments, metropolitan planning organizations and other agency recipients have put a total of $493 million in federal deployment funding to a wide range of uses--alphabetically, from the University of Alabama-Birmingham's automatic crash notification work to the Texas Transportation Institute's Translink project.

There has been a 37% rise in the number of freeway miles with-real time traffic data collection technologies and an 83% increase in travel or information dissemination, said Bud Wright, the executive director of the Federal Highway Administration.

Utah has invested over $120 million to deploy its "Commuter Link" ITS system, including a traffic operations center in Salt Lake City, with sizable reported reductions in traffic congestion. Minnesota is testing systems that warn motorists when they are about to leave the roadway, and has developed technologies that make it possible for snowplow drivers to detect where the side of the roadway is--an important safety matter, said Elwyn Tinklenberg, Commissioner of Transportation for Minnesota.

The Michigan DOT now has a freeway management system consisting of 54 changeable message signs, 2,419 electronic vehicle sensors embedded in freeway pavement, 60 stop-and-go traffic signals at freeway entrance ramps, 11 highway advisory radio transmitters and a highway advisory phone system, and real-time traffic congestion information on the Internet.

Optimal traffic signalization in Los Angeles has cut emissions by 14%, vehicle stops by 41%, travel time by 18%, traffic delays by 44% and boosted average speeds by 16%, according to ITSA House testimony.

Evolving uses

The big, new element in the ITS picture, of course, involves how to use ITS for security--to prevent terrorist attacks involving the nation's transportation system and to use transportation to react swiftly and decisively to any attacks, like those on Sept. 11 last year, that might occur.

ITS is lauded for helping move people out of terrorist-attacked New York and Virginia on Sept. 11, and its proponents like Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D., Calif.,) noted that ITS can also track the movement of commercial vehicles to ensure the security of hazardous materials transport, use biometric technologies to help make secure parts of airports and seaports truly secure and even provide secure communications by satellite if a sky marshal needs to report a cockpit security breach to an air traffic control center.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) believe that ITS--after emerging from being an end in itself to being a "critical means to achieving…capacity, safety, security and reliability" goals.

Minnesota Commissioner Tinklenberg said during a recent symposium held by the Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee, "ITS can also play an important role in ensuring the security of America's transportation system, and in facilitating post-disaster emergency response and evacuation technologies."

10-Year ITS Plan

ITSA, working with the U.S. Department of Transportation, has come up with a 10-year ITS program plan that the DOT requested, which, if followed, would set ambitious parameters for the TEA-21 reauthorization exercise. This plan envisions, for example, the federal government encouraging a multi-disciplinary approach to transportation system management and operations for improved easing of traffic congestion and response to crises, high levels of cooperation among neighboring political jurisdictions; an expanded focus on performance and customer service; more effective cooperative relationships between the public and private sectors; a more potent mix of public and private investment; and better management of the existing public investment in transportation infrastructure.

A key to all this would be an integrated network of transportation information to facilitate more flexible travel choices, full coordination between various modes of transportation, a single payment system for regional and national travel, and timely, accurate commercial vehicle and freight data shared electronically among authorized stakeholders to support safety, security, productivity, mobility and environmental goals.

A national transportation information network should be the backbone of the intelligent surface transportation system, linking all metropolitan and rural systems into "an integrated yet distributed data network," Oakland County, Mich.'s Bair testified before the House subcommittee.

Other goals in the 10-year plan include advanced crash avoidance technologies; automatic crash and incident detection, notification and response, and advanced transportation management, to reduce congestion and make traffic flow more freely, make work zones and highway-railroad intersections safer, manage travel speeds in anticipation of and reacting to changing weather conditions and clearing incidents more quickly, to reduce secondary incidents and congestion.

The objective is to realize the potential that Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta had in mind when he said recently, "ITS means powerful benefits in managing congestion, reducing crashes and improving the efficiency of the trucking and transit industries."

Mineta himself has been an avid ITS proponent, while he was a House member and as a former member of the ITSA board of directors. And all the federal rhetoric--by DOT officials and those in Congress--have been supportive of an expanded government role to encourage ITS improvements, come TEA-21 reauthorization time next year.

Backing in Congress is widespread. Several members of the House Highways and Transit subcommittee, including Chairman Thomas Petri (R., Wisc.), voiced strong support for ITS technologies during the May 21 hearing.

Both Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) and Ellen Tauscher of California, who co-chair the 36-member House ITS caucus, are certainly ITS backers, seeking to educate their colleagues about the transportation benefits that ITS offers.

But what all that means for federal funding and other changes in the new legislation is uncertain, at this time.

Accelerated funding?

At the U.S. DOT, they're playing it close to the vest, well aware of the budget constraints imposed by the Bush Administration, despite the heightened awareness of the safety, mobility and, above all, security implications of the TEA-21 reauthorization. What the feds come up with in proposing the new legislation won't be disclosed until this winter--possibly around Fiscal 2004 budget-proposal time, in February. 2003.

Meanwhile, various ITS interests are plumping for more federal money for their programs.

Calling a wide range of competitive proposals "unbelievable," Thomas Bulger, president of Government Relations Inc., a lobbying group, told an ITSA-sponsored reauthorization workshop recently, "You have to really hurry up and decide soon (what to propose and how) in order to get your points across," according to ITS America News, the group's newsletter.

ITSA itself advocates strengthening federally-aided ITS programs, which, as president Schuster puts it means, "ITS funding should be accelerated." His group urges such moves as expanding Intelligent Vehicle Initiative research; encouraging deployment through federal fleet demonstration projects, money to states and localities and consumer tax credits, and all the efforts foreseen by the ITSA 10-year plan, headed by the information network.

AASHTO, meanwhile, recommends that Congress provide a dedicated ITS research and development program to launch the next stage in the evolution of ITS technologies at about $125 million a year, and continuation of the current ITS deployment program, at a funding level of $142 million annually, to advance such developments as the 511 traveler-information system, CVISN to aid commercial vehicle movement, road and weather information systems, incident response systems and safety initiatives. Under TEA-21, R & D funding for ITS has risen from $95 million in Fiscal 1998 to $110 million in Fiscal 2003, and deployment money from $101 million to $122 million.

It's widely expected that to stop congressional appropriations committees from earmarking money for specific local projects, the authorizing committees may seek to kill specific deployment financing provisions. Instead, they could apportion the money to states in categorical grants similar to those for the National Highway System or Surface Transportation Program funding; or just leave it to state and local agencies to rely on flexible deployment-projects funding from the National Highway, Surface Transportation and Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement programs. (Indeed, funding recipients say they need more flexibility where federal rules are too rigid, in their view.)

How much of that highway-formula money is used for ITS work is difficult to determine, mainly because the ITS-related spending is woven into larger projects, as it is heavily so in the massive, $14 billion Boston "Big Dig" transportation project.

To what extent a traffic signaling improvement is ITS-related and to what extent it involves routine work that would have been done without any ITS technology available is hard to say. A look at a few states such as Virginia, Minnesota and Arizona shows that spending on ITS projects involves federal and state or local money on a 50-50 basis, with probably only a third of the federal funds coming from the specific ITS research and deployment provisions, said Jeff Paniatti, of the DOT ITS Joint Program office. 

Recipients' use of the broad formula-program money dwarfs the specific ITS research and deployment funding provisions, one lobbyist for ITS projects said, calling the $100 million-plus money under those provisions "chump change." Another question, he said, is whether Congress--having decided in 1997 to let the states, counties and cities pretty much decide how they will use federal ITS money, will now--for security and other national purposes--start directing them how to use that money wisely.

Meanwhile, AASHTO also seeks another $3 billion over six years for deployment of ITS "infostructure" technologies, the national information network that ITSA's 10-year plan envisions.

Addressing the security issue, which has given intelligent transportation a whole new dimension in the past year, ITSA's Homeland Security Task Force has recommended that in the TEA-21 reauthorization, security-related ITS applications be considered, including the use of cameras and other devices to provide traffic surveillance, "asset-tracking" for commercial vehicles and transit systems, and means to provide quick dissemination of information to the public in an emergency.

"My personal conclusion is that there's really no new requirement out there now that we didn't know on Sept. 10 (2001). What's changed is that security has become a higher priority, and must be accelerated," Henry Hungerbeeler, Director of the Missouri DOT and Chairman of the AASHTO Task Force on Transportation Security, testified in the recent Senate subcommittee symposium on operations and security.

Many proposals have both direct security implications and daily utility in transportation, he said. "We need…significant increases in the next reauthorization act, just to help us with those things that do enhance security, but also to help us in our everyday lives, as we transport ourselves and all the things that we use," Hungerbeeler said.