Amid the reminiscent 40th anniversary atmosphere of the American Traffic Safety Services Association’s (ATSSA) Annual Traffic Expo in San Antonio last February, a group of attendees were writing a prologue to the future. Manufacturers listened intently as transportation officials representing about 13 different DOTs recited their product “wish lists.” The expo’s first-ever Circle of Innovation roundtable gathering certainly had an air of confidentiality, and its transcript is available only to association members. While the innovations that emanated from those talks—and any preliminary product development that followed—were kept under wraps, participants were eager to discuss the value of the roundtable.
“This is an industry first,” James Baron, director of communications and public relations with ATSSA, told Roads & Bridges. “We had been hearing for years from people out in the field who install signs, stripe the roads, etc., say, ‘I could do my job a lot better and more efficiently and safely if only I had ‘X.’’ They had all these ideas. So what we did is we created this forum to bring all these public officials from all over the country together to step up to the microphone and actually say, ‘I’m from Minnesota or I’m from Wisconsin, and I could do my job better if . . .’”
The event proved productive, with 77 potential new products counted as arising from the talks. Officials and manufacturers alike kept tight-lipped on specifics, but did reveal some of the major themes to include improvements to signage, pavement markings, message boards, national standards from the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) and other topics, which included devices, software, snow removal and crash-data-analysis tools.
About 100 people—a mix of representatives from all levels of agency, along with manufacturers and ATSSA representatives—took part in the roundtable, held on the last day of the conference. It was available by invitation only to public officials, contractors and all expo exhibitors.
“I didn’t want to leave,” Joe Jeffrey, chairman of ATSSA, told Roads & Bridges. “All kinds of different ideas were coming out. Some of them were a little wacky...Overall, I was impressed with the quality and sophistication of the ideas.”
Sales-pitch silencer
Another unique characteristic of the roundtable event was that it restricted manufacturers from doing their favorite thing: plugging their products. “There was no two-way discussion,” Baron said. “The manufacturers just sat there and observed and took notes. What we hope is that the manufacturers will take these ideas and go out and manufacture these things and then deliver them to the public officials who can use them out in the field.” Greg Driskell, president of Professional Pavement Products Inc., described the scene, which was highly organized.
“Probably about a dozen [people] actually came down to the table,” he told Roads & Bridges. “It was like an arena. We had four riser sections, riser seating. In the middle of the box that was created by those risers was a little table and on that table there was a moderator; and there were two more chairs, and those chairs were usually occupied by an agency.”
The moderator, Bruce Ibarguen, state traffic engineer, Maine DOT, held a list of people who had interest in speaking at the microphone.
“It was interesting because the ideas were from BHAG—big, hairy, audacious goals—all the way down to what they need right now in order to survive,” Driskell said. “There were things like, ‘We’d like to see a device that can detect people texting from their vehicle,’ and to me that’s BHAG. Then they would ask all the way down to, ‘Can we have a pavement marker that won’t keep coming out of the ground?’
“I call them simple solutions—they’re obtainable solutions, very quickly. I think it gave the transportation agencies an opportunity to say what they want, and it gave the manufacturers an opportunity to see what that is. Now we can focus on what they want—what is needed rather than what we think is needed. As a manufacturer it gave me some good direction.”
Driskell also noticed on several occasions that the officials asked for products that already existed, unbeknownst to them.
“But it gets our wheels turning,” he said. “Immediately after that conference I went to the Intertraffic Show in Amsterdam, and the purpose of that trip was to look for items that met some of these needs.”
Driskell also took note of the most common traffic safety needs by region. “When you’re a manufacturer the ideal situation is that you’re able to develop products for the entire United States,” he said. “But you find out there are specific regional needs. For some humid areas like Florida, dew is a real problem and anytime you have dew on the face of a sign, it reduces or can eliminate the reflectivity of that sign.”
Thus, one of the questions Driskell remembered most vividly was, “Can we create coating or sheeting that doesn’t allow dew to build up on it—because if dew builds up on it, so will ice?”
“They were asking for something that wouldn’t ice up,” he continued. “I went to Amsterdam and, sure enough, they had a coating that you could put on things on signs and the chemical makeup of it wouldn’t allow frost. There was a solution to that problem.”
Ibarguen described the highlights of his experience as moderator of the circle.
“One of [the questions], which happens to be a pet peeve of my own, was the concept of somehow developing a device that takes the snow and ice off the top of tractor-trailer units—if you’re driving on the freeway after a snow event, the snow and ice will blow off the top of the tractor-trailers as they go down the road. What if there were something those vehicles could drive through that could sweep them off?”
Markings came up a lot, possibly because of the upcoming notice of proposed rulemaking from the Federal Highway Administration on pavement markings and retroreflectivity, “and also, durability for the northern states was a concern,” Ibarguen added.
Ibarguen also recounted considerable discussion on sign vandalism. “I’m sure that some of the product manufacturers were there taking it all in and thinking, ‘We could do something about this,’” he said. “I said afterwards that I think maybe it was too restrictive on the fact that all of the product manufacturers were all told, ‘You can ask questions, but you were not supposed to promote products.’ That was nice, but on the other hand it might have stimulated even more discussion if [the manufacturers] had said, ‘Well, we have such and such.’
Cross-traffic
There already is a buzz about next year’s event, which will likely draw significantly more participants because it will be held before the final day. But Driskell already was impressed by the representation at the 2010 event.
“We saw state governments; we saw state agencies. We saw city agencies and we saw county agencies—and we really saw beyond that even: There was a police department there,” he said. “It was great to have all levels of transportation agencies. A state has a different need. For instance, states don’t worry about traffic calming. A city does. A city needs to calm the traffic through their neighborhood street.”
Robert “Bubba” Lee, CEO of Vulcan Inc., was impressed with the event, but offered some critique. He also said he hopes next year’s event will yield more talk relevant to his company’s area of expertise. “I thought the event was very good,” he told Roads & Bridges. “The energy of the public officials was very good. But they tended to not be as descriptive about what they were trying to do and what they wanted a product to do that with.”
But Driskell believed the experience to be priceless and said 80% of the problems they brought up were “solvable issues.”
“It wasn’t attended as well as it should have been, but I don’t think anybody knew what was going to happen,” he said. “To me you’re crazy if you’re a vendor or manufacturer and you didn’t show up—you lost out. And I think next year that room is going to be packed.”
