Most Likely to Succeed

As the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) industry enters its teenage years, the secret of making ITS a full-fledged force in the nation’s transportation scheme is seen by many as expressed in three words: deployment, deployment, deployment.

Using new technologies, emphasizing more research and development of even newer ones and creating new applications for existing methods are all important, industry and government officials who are hip deep in ITS programs say. But what’s most needed now is integrating current technologies and expanding the extent of applications of those technologies to more city, county and state surface transportation activity. This, they say, will require substantially greater government funding and private investment plus more innovative ways to put existing knowhow to work on and in the ground.

And—not the least important—it will require greater strides in educating motorists and other consumers about what everything from automatic vehicle crash avoidance to sophisticated traffic management can do for them. ITS advocates say that most ordinary motorists are still unaware of what’s happening on the ITS scene, but that when they become aware, they can become fans.

“It’s one thing to tell people about ITS, but when you allow them to touch and feel it, the level of interest explodes. Experience makes converts,” said Neil Schuster, ITS America president.

Still not full

ITS officials are working hard to see that workable methods are deployed on a much fuller basis, and they’re having some success. No longer are intelligent transportation ideas dismissed by critics as “Buck Rogers” stuff. They’re being put into practice on many fronts.

“Now we’re seeing things actually deployed, and we’re seeing technologies come along we didn’t even dream of” in the late 1980s, said Brent Bair, managing director of the Road Commission for Oakland County, Mich., who is the current chairman of ITS America. Lane-keeping and road-hugging, adaptive cruise control, improved infrared night vision systems, collision or truck rollover warnings and vehicle and infrastructure communication systems to enhance intersection safety are some of them. At the recent ITS World Congress in Nagoya, Japan, for instance, Hitachi demonstrated a prototype system that lets drivers get up-to-date maps and other information through a wireless LAN system, fed data from roadside base stations installed at car dealerships and other locations. Toshiba presented a technology that allows drivers to monitor a virtual overhead image of their car, helping them negotiate tight parking spaces or narrow roads.

Again emphasizing deployment, Shelley Row, the Institute of Traffic Engineers’ associate director for technical programs, said, “When in-vehicle sensor systems become mature, we will see a huge leap forward.” But meanwhile her boss, Tom Brahms, ITE’s executive director and CEO, said the new ITS technology so far is impressive, but “what we are not seeing is the rapidity with which people thought it would move out.”

And the ITS role in improving transportation is gaining more recognition. During the recent presidential campaign, President Bush and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) were asked by AAA World what the government can do to reduce traffic congestion, and both candidates included ITS in their answers. In a hearing, Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee said that technology will be very important in the U.S. fight against terrorism, and the 9/11 Commission agreed that “the most powerful investments” may be to improve technology for all transportation modes. Meanwhile, a House ITS-promoting caucus has grown to 55 members in four years.

“We could be doing more, but for the lack of (sufficient) funding,” Bair said. He and others emphasize the necessity of moving ahead with an escalated deployment effort and paying for that effort with sharply increased financing under new multiyear federal highway reauthorization legislation that has been stalled for two years, with six temporary extensions in the meantime.

Millions and billions

The six-year House reauthorization bill—the Transportation Efficiency Act-Logistic Utilization, or TEA-LU—recognizes the deployments funding need by boosting deployment money substantially to $500 million a year, or $3 billion total, from $122 million a year, where the figure has stalled for three years. The Bush administration has proposed $810 million over six years dedicated for ITS deployment based on state-by-state formula distribution under a performance incentive program, along with legislative language allowing the highway-funding core program to be used for ITS. The Senate bill is much narrower in deployment funding. In fact, more money is used by state transportation departments for ITS from core highway funds than from specific federal ITS financing, though the states are often reluctant to divert any roadbuilding money for other purposes.

The House measure also would raise six-year ITS research and development funding to $690 million, 14% over TEA-21. The administration bill would increase that money by 20% to $726 million, while the Senate bill would reduce it. The actual level of ITS funding that emerges when the reauthorization bill is finally agreed upon is expected to reflect the overall highway programs funding in the bill. The House had proposed $284 billion in the 108th Congress, the Senate had approved $318 billion, and the two bodies had reached a compromise figure of $299 billion, with the administration proposing $256 billion. Now, they’ll have to start over in the new 109th Congress.

And while “we continue to need robust research programs, what we really need is to accelerate deployment” of ITS systems, said Steve Kuciemba, vice president-programs at ITS America.

Those reauthorization bills also would have allotted $25 million in total money for additional state-by-state deployment of commercial vehicle information systems and networks (CVISN) aimed at improving safety and productivity of commercial vehicles (U.S. DOT says nine states have completed deployment of core CVISN capabilities) and provision for HOT lanes for electronic toll collection, while the House bill included allocations for over $80 million in specific ITS deployment projects. Separately, a bill offered by Rogers and others in July would give consumers a $1,000 tax deduction when they buy vehicles equipped with qualifying ITS features.

Necessity item

Meanwhile, the ITS industry is growing, though any reliable way to measure the growth of the multifaceted industry still doesn’t exist. Estimates put industry sales at “several billion dollars,” but no one seems to know. As for profitability, the picture is mixed. Established firms like PB Farradyne, which sells a wide range of ITS products, and Navigation Technologies are showing a good profit, “but other companies appear to be struggling,” said Larry Yermack, PB Farradyne’s president. Competition is fierce in the maturing business of building ITS infrastructure, holding profits down, and many other companies are undoubtedly in the development stage of their slice of the ITS market, when profits are hard to come by, he noted.

Thus, the state of the ITS industry at age 14 is promising, but it can get a lot better. Building on a concept of an intelligent vehicle highway system developed in 1990 by the Highway Users Federation to concentrate on applying advanced computer, electronic and sensor technologies, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) cranked the idea into a six-year program designed to change the entire federal-aid highway effort from a construction program to one with new, smarter vehicles and roads. The ITS provisions were largely research oriented.

In 1997, the Transportation Efficiency Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) advanced the ITS concept, with more emphasis on deployment. Today, we see the results of that shift in the form of in-vehicle navigation systems, automatic vehicle location systems, collision warning systems, electronic toll collection, changeable message signs, traffic management and other advances in vehicle and roadside technologies and applications that did not exist just a generation ago. It has become a cliché that today’s new car has more computer power than the Apollo spacecraft that landed on the moon.

It hasn’t been smooth. There are notable successes, but in some respects the momentum of the impact these advances are having on surface transportation has slowed as traffic volumes continue to grow and investment in transportation technology remains tight. ITS has been a classic example of trial and error, where what didn’t work was discarded or modified and what did work was improved upon and adopted as “state of the art.”

James Costantino, the first executive director of the Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Society of America, now ITS America, who oversaw the national ITS effort in its formative years until his retirement in 1998, wrote in the spring 1995 AASHTO Journal that $6 billion would be needed in public and private investment to implement ITS. Despite introduction of such technologies as now commonplace changeable electronic message signs, the needed investment didn’t happen.

Costantino noted that traffic signals are still not synchronized in many places (half of signalized intersections in a DOT survey of 108 metropolitan areas were under centralized computer control) and the General Motors Corp. prediction that by the early 21st century 50% of all vehicles would be equipped with OnStar in-vehicle safety and communications-type technology just didn’t materialize. However, GM announced in September that for the 2006 model year 3 million vehicles would be OnStar-equipped, up from 1.4 million in 2004 and 2.2 million in 2005.

“The problem was that ITS was viewed as a luxury, not a necessity,” Costantino said. Looking ahead, he sees ITS as a solution to the growing problem of traffic congestion, and “the mantra now is that ITS is not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” he said. “Considering the budget restraints, we’ve done OK.”

Growing coverage

As for curbing traffic congestion, the 2004 Urban Mobility Report issued by the Texas Transportation Institute lauds Seattle and other cities for using freeway ramp metering and other methods to curb traffic buildups, but said that overall American cities are falling further behind in the effort with each passing year. ITS runs into other problems, such as people’s concerns about their privacy being invaded by in-vehicle devices that track their every movement, controversies over use of red-light cameras and worries about distractions that can be caused by use of cell phones or in-vehicle navigation aids. Or ITS vulnerability to sabotage, such as the recent time that a prankster hacked into a New York MTA message board at the W. 4th St. station, declaring that “Pretty Girls Don’t Ride the Subway.”

But there have been many ITS advances. Electronic toll collection is almost universally available. It’s deployed in 95% of toll collection plazas.

“We started with nothing, and today E-ZPass uses the same technology from my home in Virginia all the way to Massachusetts,” Costantino said.

The Federal Communications Commission gave 5-1-1 travel-advisory communication the green light in 2000, and the system is already in effect for more than a fourth of the U.S. population. Industry movers and shakers expect 50% coverage by the end of 2005 and full coverage by the end of 2010. The ITS Deployment Tracking Database shows 61 of the 75 largest metropolitan areas with a basic level of infrastructure deployment in each of five traffic management categories, and 87 of 135, or 64%, of freeway management agencies have a traffic management center. Variable messaging is used by two-thirds of 108 metropolitan areas on freeways.

Almost daily news comes out, for example, about Trafficland’s Airvideo service, showing videos of traffic conditions in the Washington, D.C., area; efforts to create a national Amber Alert child-kidnapping message system; the North Carolina DOT using dynamic message signs, a website and 5-1-1 to help thousands of travelers during tropical storms Frances and Ivan; and the National Emergency Number Association creating a next-generation E9-1-1 system, including wireless phone service.

Zeroing in

To help set the stage for the future, ITS America in 2002 issued The National Intelligent Transportation Plan: A Ten-Year Vision as a benchmark to measure progress toward five ITS goals: safety (reduce annual transportation deaths by 15% by 2011, saving as many as 7,000 lives a year); security against attacks and natural disasters; efficiency/economy—save at least $2 billion a year; mobility/access—universally available information to support travel choices; and energy/environment—save at last 1 billion gallons of gasoline a year and reduce emissions accordingly.

Two years into the 10-year vision, Schuster said that many of the plan’s elements have been translated into programs. “I’m happy to see that those ideas have taken root,” he said.

The vision has now been refined, with Bair announcing at the Oct. 18 opening of the 2004 World Congress in Nagoya that the group has developed a new vision: zero fatalities and zero delays for transportation. He said, “Whether and how soon we approach that vision will rest in large part in how successful we are in integrating ITS throughout our transportation networks.” For its part, the U.S. DOT sought to deal more effectively with highway deaths (43,000 in 2003) and costly, time-consuming traffic congestion with nine new ITS initiatives, including integrated vehicle safety systems, nationwide surface transportation weather observing and forecasting, vehicle/ infrastructure integration and mobility for all Americans. These were announced at the ITS America annual meeting in San Antonio in April 2004.

TME