North America needs a Highway Traffic Control System (HiTraCS) that facilitates national interoperability of intelligent vehicles and supports uncongested regional surface transportation. We have studied congestion for 30 years. It is high time to act. The 2009 reauthorization bill must provide the necessary billions for a HiTraCS program to provide national interoperability for smart vehicles and regional congestion mitigation.
Thirty years ago, the final touches were put on the 1978 Surface Transportation Assistance Act, which included a $30 million earmark to “demonstrate coordinated control of an urban freeway corridor.” The 35-mile I-495 corridor on Long Island in New York state was selected by the Federal Highway Administration for the project.
Interstate 495, the Long Island Expressway, had earned the title of “the world’s longest parking lot.” The Integrated Motorist Information System (IMIS) would combine freeways and arterials managed by a control center using a central software package.
IMIS was representative of the state of the practice at the time. The IMIS design included automated incident detection using thousands of loops, placed in all lanes. Incident detection worked technically but failed operationally due to a high false alarm rate (four false to one true). The project had a near-equal share of technical triumphs and failures. The biggest achievement was not a demonstration of technology. It was daily congestion management that improved flow in the corridor and therein universal acceptance.
Public acceptance is evident in the fact that the system is still there and has operated essentially intact for over 20 years. Longevity is prized in transportation.
If we are going to beat the insidious, creeping congestion crisis in North America, we need to redesign and replace the old transportation systems to meet today’s needs. With the high degree of public support these systems are receiving, there is no reason we should be fighting modern-day congestion with antiquated tools.
In the 1980s, most major urban areas in the U.S. implemented Freeway Traffic Management Systems (FTMS). Many mimicked the IMIS approach, and a few improved upon it. Unfortunately, wholesale redesign and replacement to support the needs of vehicle-infrastructure integration (VII) and 5-1-1 systems is unfunded. The systems are falling apart.
The “Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems” (IVHS) program of the 1990s recognized that instrumentation of the highway was only part of the picture, and the real solution to congestion would have to include instrumentation of vehicles. IVHS stumbled along and morphed into intelligent transportation systems (ITS), an acronym made sacrosanct by the formation of ITS America in 1992. The development of ITS technology has been painfully slow and shared the same funding sources for research and implementation as the IMIS-like FTMS programs. As a result, there were fewer FTMS system deployments in the 1990s than in the 1980s. In reality ITS has defined what needs to be done but diluted the paltry funding across a broader spectrum of miniprojects and failed to muster adequate deployment dollars to build the vaunted “National ITS Architecture.”
The top 10 most congested cities in America have antiquated FTMS based on outdated research and practices, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. These systems have an average design age of over 20 years. Initiatives like integrated corridor management, high-occupancy toll lanes, managed lanes, VII and urban partnership agreements cannot succeed if based on this decrepit semi-intelligent infrastructure.
The 2009 legislation must create a replacement program for the most congested cities to instrument the highways with modern technology using a nationally standardized and coordinated approach. The systems must be redesigned and replaced with modern technology including new regional multimodal traffic management centers. The time for HiTraCS is now. We need bold legislative leadership. The legislators whose legacy is uncongested highways will have improved the lives of every American. The huddled masses are yearning to be mobile.
On the other hand, if enough good people do nothing, and the money doesn’t flow, neither will the vehicles.
RSS: Roads & Bridges Articles
