Steaming from way back in intelligent transportation's
flotilla is the new "5-1-1" travel advisory service that tells
motorists in some areas where to expect traffic tie-ups caused by highway
crashes and other events. But the talk in the ITS community is that 5-1-1
services before long could become their flagship.
Since the Federal Communications Commission in July 2000
designated 5-1-1, at least temporarily, as the single three-digit information
telephone number available to states and local jurisdictions, the number is
fast joining 9-1-1, the emergency phone number, and 2-1-1 (community services)
in the lineup of universal three-digit numbers for public services. The first
5-1-1 service began in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky in 2001, and 18 of the
5-1-1 services are now up and running. These include statewide coverage in 13
states--many of them Midwest and Western states using 5-1-1 largely for
weather-related traffic advisories--and others in regions including the San
Francisco Bay area, the Orlando, Fla., area and western Virginia. Another 12
services are planned for launching between now and early 2004.
Nationwide, 5-1-1 calls climbed from 88,360 in June 2001 to
207,481 in June 2002 and to a peak of 918,822 in February of this year, as more
services went into operation and more callers became aware of 5-1-1, but then
fell back to 533,035 in June of this year. The volume of calls is influenced
greatly by weather, major sports or other events in the area and, of course,
highway crashes and road construction.
These services, run by state transportation departments, are
now available to about 50 million people, and a 511 Deployment Coalition
predicts more services will mean coverage for half the U.S. population by the
end of 2005, the entire nation by 2010. A second national 5-1-1 deployment
conference is planned by the coalition on Oct. 7-9 of this year at the
Drawbridge Inn in Fort Mitchell, Ky., in the Cincinnati metropolitan area.
The services permit motorists, truck drivers and shippers to
get current reports on those routes where road conditions, highway crashes,
local events and other occurrences cause heavy traffic congestion and can
affect travel plans and what alternative mass transit options are available.
"You can pick up the telephone, hit 5-1-1 and find out all kinds of
information that makes it safer for North Dakotans to travel," said Gov.
John Hoeven.
More of a service
In the future it's envisioned that 5-1-1 callers could be
switched to hotel, restaurant, entertainment and other locations, where they
could make reservations. That's already happening to a limited extent with the
5-1-1 service that's available along I-81 and the rest of western Virginia.
Some 5-1-1 managers are exploring the idea of providing "highway helper"
service, helping motorists manage emergencies such as a flat tire or running
out of gas.
But it's also possible that sometime in the future state
DOTs will start turning the service over to private companies, which might
offer premium services like customized calls or e-mail messages to the
subscriber where there is a traffic tie-up on his or her favorite route.
Transportation officials are of two minds as to whether that's something they
really want to do. For one thing, they're not sure motorists want to give up
free service; there is currently no additional charge beyond whatever fees a
person might have to pay for a local phone call today.
The FCC had allowed the use of 5-1-1 for travel advisory
purposes on a "use-it-or-lose-it" basis and will review progress in
implementing the number at the end of 2005 to determine whether to keep it
reserved for travel advisories or to open it up for other applications. But the
511 Deployment Coalition, which consists of the American Association of State
Highway & Transportation Officials, the Intelligent Transportation Society
of America and the American Public Transit Association, is confident that 5-1-1
will be used so much by 2005 that it will be here to stay as an exclusive
travel advisory.
So much so that Larry Yermack, president of PB Farradyne
Inc. and recent ITS America chairman, has repeatedly said that 5-1-1 will
become "the face of ITS in America." Most people know little about
intelligent transportation, and 5-1-1 itself still isn't widely known, but as
more and more travelers learn to use it, it will become the leading purveyor of
travel information, Yermack said.
That seems quite likely if many motorists are like Allison
Coburn, an executive assistant to a northern California radio broadcasters
group who has used the San Francisco-area 5-1-1 service frequently since it
began operating last December. Whenever she wants to drive from or back to San
Francisco, usually visiting her husband's family in Redwood City, 30 miles to
the south, she first calls 5-1-1's voice-activated system to find out if there
are any traffic tie-ups along U.S. Highway 101, her route of choice. Often
there have been such snags so she avoids the tie-up by taking I-280.
The traffic advisories are more detailed and route-specific
and cover the area better than sporadic news reports or advisories that are
available, Coburn said. 5-1-1 is "so easy to use, and you don't have to
remember a whole telephone number," she added.
The way they do it
DOTs gather the traffic data in a number of ways. The Cincinnati-northern
Kentucky service--the Advanced Regional Traffic Interactive Management &
Information System, or ARTIMIS--seeks to improve traffic conditions and safety
along 88 miles of the region's highways. At recent count it was using more than
80 cameras, 57 center-lane miles of fiber-optic cable, about 1,100 detectors of
various types, 40 fixed changeable message signs, three portable changeable
message signs, two highway advisory radio frequencies, five freeway service
patrol vans and a control center in downtown Cincinnati.
The Washington state system, which began a year ago, was the
first to provide callers with real-time traffic congestion updates that loop
detectors in the field send directly into the telecommunications system,
consolidating data for two- to four-mile stretches of roadway. Loop detectors
in major roads throughout the greater Puget Sound area already provided
color-coded flow maps at the state DOT's website. 5-1-1 services elsewhere
typically rely on people to key in or record the traffic-flow data.
Here's how the 5-1-1 system works, taking Utah's service as
an example:
Using its
Advanced Traffic Management System--including 200 cameras and hundreds of
sensors embedded in the highway that monitor traffic and voice reports from sources
such as the state highway patrol--state DOT officials pinpoint locations where
the flow of traffic is impeded by a crash, an overturned truck-trailer, a
sports event or a moose on the road.
Computer
operators sitting in front of a large 16-square screen place the pertinent
information--where the problem exists and how long traffic is expected to be
blocked or slowed down by closed lanes--on a screen. This information is then
disseminated to the public in several ways, the 5-1-1 system being the newest.
For the 5-1-1 service, a computerized XML text file is created and is refreshed
with new traffic tie-up data at least once a minute, whenever new tie-ups
occur. That information is then transmitted to a data center run by Tellme
Network in Phoenix, Ariz., or in Santa Clara, Calif. Using a base of several
thousand words and phrases already recorded by Darby Bailey, a woman with a
pleasant voice, the Tellme center automatically assembles a "concatenated
speech," or linked message, for each traffic tieup that is reported.
When a motorist in Utah calls 5-1-1, the call is routed
through the phone company's 800 number to the Tellme data center, where the
caller, saying his or her preferences (voice recognition is more commonly used
by 5-1-1 services than the touchtone method), first gets a choice of traffic,
transit or ferries, then picks a city or town, such as Salt Lake City, then
chooses from a range of routes--I-15, I-80, Big Cottonwood Canyon, 4100 South,
and so on. When the choices are narrowed down to the route segment, the
Tellme-concatenated message is delivered. If the right snippets aren't
available for a concatenated message, the computer creates a synthesized voice
message. In any event, the caller knows what problem he or she faces and can
then change their actual travel route or call ahead to let people know they'll
be late.
Utah's call volume rose from 20,000 in January of this year
to 37,000 in February, when snowstorms increased, and then trailed off to
13,000 by June. For the first half of the year, the Utah system handled 140,000
calls, compared with 230,000 in all of last year. When the winter Olympics were
held in February 2002, and storms were heavy, volume rose to 39,000 calls.
"We overrode a lot of our normal stuff in order to
accommodate the Olympics. But to make that level of effort all the time would
be a bit much," said Paul Jencks, a DOT information services support
specialist.
The Florida DOT uses a similar system to the Utah service in
the Orlando area, except that the traffic tie-up information along 50 miles of
the I-4 corridor isn't given in a concatenated message but in messages recorded
specifically for each incident at an Orlando traffic operations center by live
telephone operators. These messages, updated every 20 minutes or right away if
there's a traffic-affecting incident, are also sent to a Tellme center, which
is best equipped to handle them. The first weekend the service drew 100,000
calls. On one day when a bridge along a major route to Disney World caught
fire, call volume soared to 14,000 from a typical average of about 3,000 calls
daily. "There is no way we could have handled that call volume
ourselves," said Anne Brewer, assistant district traffic operations
engineer for Florida DOT's District 5. She said she also may have to go to
concatenated speech messages if volume gets too heavy.
The Florida DOT also uses a transponder reader system with
more than 500,000 toll tags issued in the area to obtain travel times and
installed four portable readers along two key arterials in the Orlando area to
study the number of transponder-equipped vehicles that use the routes.
Extinguishing the bugs
State DOT officials live in fear of not being able to handle
call volume, callers having to hang on or dispensing inaccurate information,
though they say they have pretty much avoided such problems. "We have not
turned back any calls; that would send a bad message," said Florida DOT's
Brewer.
The nine-county San Francisco area service run by the area's
Metropolitan Transportation Commission has built a redundant system to use as a
backup, but has still had some "glitch" transfers that didn't work,
"which is very bad," said Melania Crotty, MTA transit coordination
and access manager. However, a recent MTA survey shows a high level of customer
satisfaction.
Voice recognition--avoiding constant "I did not
understand you" responses--can be difficult to perfect, said Rick Schuman,
manager of traveler information systems for PBS&J. So can be identifying routes
so that callers know what the message is referring to--the "Stack" in
Arizona, for example, instead of the numbered highways which intersect there.
Handling calls across state borders also is tricky. DOTs are working with ways
to transfer calls between Utah and Arizona, for instance, from one state to the
other's 5-1-1 service or to switch the response message from the state at issue
to the caller from the next state.
Another challenge is designing menus, "making sure that
you have something that people can navigate quickly and easily," Schuman
said. "In Orlando, they've done it so well that the average call is 40
seconds right now," he said.
Proponents of 5-1-1 service say that probably the biggest
problems involve getting state DOTs to agree to spend some of their highway
money to create a 5-1-1 program, and getting telephone companies to allow the
necessary access to their 800 long-distance lines for 5-1-1 calls. "I'm
convinced that technology is the easy part. Getting people in line is the difficult
part," said Kevin Baron, ITS program manager for the Virginia DOT.
DOT officials in states including Virginia, Utah and
California, or their technical consultants, have had problems with telephone
companies. Some of them don't want to deal with fractions of a state, and
"getting everyone to understand your coverage area and getting their
switches to support a three-digit call" can be troublesome, said Peter
Dwyer, PB Farradyne 5-1-1 project manager for the San Francisco area. TME
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