Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Meeting airs hope of safer highways
A symposium in Roanoke presented visions of intelligent transportation systems.
The latest from The Ticker blog
Tomorrow's roads promise to be safer, not just because of more airbags or better brakes, but because of better connections among drivers, cars and the road.
That was the consensus of a panel of experts at COVITS -- the Commonwealth of Virginia Information Technology Symposium -- held Monday at the Hotel Roanoke.
"The use of technology for transportation offers great opportunities," said Gary Allen, chief of technology, research and innovation for VDOT. And they're the kinds of opportunities that will affect every driver on the road.
Transportation researchers and managers call the concept ITS -- intelligent transportation systems. Think of it as information and communications technology applied to cars and trucks.
"The average American spends one week a year stuck in traffic," said Michael Freitas, managing director of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Intelligent Transportation System Joint Program Office. And it's getting worse.
"Congestion will increase 50 percent in the next 10 years," he said, and freight traffic is going up.
But roads are expensive, and more of them isn't necessarily the solution.
"VDOT can't build Virginia out of congestion," said Connie Sorrell, chief of system operations for VDOT. Instead, the focus will be on increasing "throughput" -- allowing more cars to share the same road space safely.
Both VDOT and the federal government are working on programs to do just that.
Virginia is working to manage traffic statewide, according to Sorrell, and motorists will soon begin to see evidence of it.
For example, the 511 system -- a free call for traffic information -- has been around since 2002, and message signs warning of congestion or accidents are even older. But VDOT hopes to make both of these more useful.
Today, when VDOT is informed of an accident, it can update roadside signs to warn drivers and suggest alternate routes. Tomorrow, the hope is, traffic cameras, weather data, police reports, even information from other drivers will all be taken into account.
For example, Freitas said a weather-information program called Clarus (Greek for "clear") could bring weather information down to the road level. The National Weather Service, he said, "tends to focus on three feet off the ground and up," and offer reports designed for pilots, while Clarus would provide helpful weather information to drivers.
That weather data could also be fed to VDOT, which could adjust the speed limits on affected roads using new sign technologies.
Another plan in the works: a better 911 system that would give dispatchers more than just a caller's voice to go by. A car's computer would detect an accident and send out a distress call, using an onboard GPS system to identify its location. Road cameras near the scene would be alerted and would send live video to the dispatcher. And data from the car itself, such as whether the airbag deployed, could also be relayed.
A connection between police and VDOT would mean that the latter could alert motorists to the accident moments after it occurred, suggesting alternate routes or adjusting the speed limit on the road -- what Freitas called "corridor management."
Even if there was no accident, the same technology could help reduce gridlock by monitoring minute-to-minute traffic conditions and helping drivers get around the worst of it.
Besides passive systems that detect an accident or simple congestion, the hope is also to have active systems in vehicles. A smart cruise control would sense a car in front and slow down automatically. Radar systems could monitor blind spots and prevent a lane-change collision. A sensor in the car would react to a red light; trying to run it would automatically trigger the brakes.
But before any technology can help avoid crashes, developers need to know why they happen in the first place. That was the focus of Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.
"We don't know enough about why drivers crash," he said. After a collision, all that's available are drivers' stories and possibly some basic information about what the car was doing. There's no other way to know how things like distractions, road conditions or response time play in an accident. The more researchers understand the role of those things, Dingus said, the more they can do to prevent them.
That was the goal of VTTI's "100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study," the results of which were released in April, which placed tiny cameras and control sensors in 100 vehicles driven by 241 volunteers in the Washington, D.C., area. Reviewing the data about 82 crashes and 761 near crashes gave researchers information that wasn't available before.
That information will be used by engineers designing the kinds of systems Allen, Freitas and Sorrell envisioned. They hope it will help create cars, roads and intersections that are safer than today's. As anyone who has driven I-81 knows, vehicles may be getting better, but drivers aren't.
