What
is the Federal role in the ITS program?
What is ITS?
Intelligent Transportation Systems represent the next step in the evolution
of the nation's entire transportation system. As information technologies and
advances in electronics continue to revolutionize all aspects of our modern-day
world, from our homes and offices to our schools and even our recreation, they
are also being applied to our transportation network. These technologies include
the latest in computers, electronics, communications and safety systems.
Where can
they be applied?
ITS can be applied to our vast transportation infrastructure
of highways, streets, and bridges, as well as to a growing number of vehicles,
including cars, buses, trucks, and trains. These information and communications
technologies can also be used to better manage and improve how transportation
providers such as governments, transit agencies and truckers offer services
to the public.
How
did ITS get started on the Federal level?
ITS became official when, in 1991, recognizing
the critical need to address our aging transportation network and its pressing
challenges, Congress legislated the ITS program.
What
four key principles guide the program?
Those principles are as follows:
(1) To promote the implementation of a technically integrated and jurisdictionally
coordinated transportation system across the country;
(2) To support ongoing applied research and technology transfer;
(3) To ensure that newly developed ITS technologies and services are safe and
cost-effective; and
(4) To create a new industry by involving and emphasizing the private sector
in all aspects of the program.
Is
there active participation, if so by whom?
People from dozens of disciplines are actively
working to bring about intelligent transportation systems and to foster this
industry. Engineers, planners, transit experts, scientists, scholars, doctors,
lawyers, elected and other public officials, and average citizens all over the
country are getting involved.
Because of this active participation, the ITS program
has been able to mature and center its sights on distinct program areas that
have a dual focus: intelligent infrastructure and intelligent vehicles. Intelligent
infrastructure is geared to satisfying the transportation needs of metropolitan
areas, rural areas and the trucking industry. Intelligent vehicles, on the other
hand, complement the ITS infrastructure by focusing on safety and information
systems for cars, trucks, buses, and trains.
What
are the key elements of the ITS metropolitan approach?
- Traffic signal control
- Freeway management
- Transit management
- Incident management
- Electronic toll collection
- Electronic fare payment
- Railroad crossings
- Emergency response
- Regional multi-modal traveler information
What
are the benefits of the ITS metropolitan approach?
- Advanced traffic surveillance and signal control
systems have resulted in travel time improvements ranging from 8 to 25%
- Freeway management systems, primarily through
ramp metering, have reduced crashes by 24 to 50% while handling 8 to 22% more
traffic at speeds 13 to 48% faster than pre-existing congested conditions.
- Electronic fare payment technologies for transit
systems have resulted in increased revenues of 3 to 30% due to fewer evasions.
- Incident management programs can reduce delay
associated with congestion caused by incidents by 10 to 45%.
- Electronic toll collection increases capacity
by 200 to 300% compared to attended lanes.
Can
you describe ITS for Commercial Vehicles?
ITS applications for commercial vehicles aim to
streamline the commercial vehicle safety regulatory system and enhance its effectiveness
in the trucking industry. They apply both to truck fleet operators and state
regulators. These systems are meant to support a safe and seamless intrastate
and interstate transportation system.
Of what is the program for commercial vehicles
comprised?
- Electronic clearance
- Automated roadside
- Onboard safety monitoring systems
- Automated administrative processes
- Freight mobility systems
- Hazardous materials incident response
What
are some of the benefits of ITS CVO?
- Onboard safety systems, along with electronic
clearance and automated roadside safety inspections, are estimated to reduce
fatalities by 14 to 32%.
- Cost savings associated with hazardous materials
incident response programs are estimated to be $1.7 million annually per state,
or $85 million nationwide.
- Automated administrative processes yield benefit/cost
ratios of 4:1 for medium-sized carriers and 20:1 for large-sized carriers;
and electronic clearance systems have been shown to reduce motor carrier labor
costs resulting in a benefit/cost ration of 7:1.
- Freight mobility systems have shown productivity
gains for private carriers of sometimes more than 25% per truck per day.
What
about ITS in rural areas?
Many of the solutions offered by ITS in rural areas
involve similar approaches to those for urban and commercial vehicle applications.
Yet, as applied, they are still distinctly rural in nature.
With
what is the rural ITS program concerned?
- Traveler safety and security technologies
- Emergency services
- Fleet operations and maintenance systems
- Public traveler and mobility services
- Roadway operations and maintenance technologies
- Tourism and travel information
- Commercial vehicle systems
What
are some of the ITS benefits in the rural area?
- Widespread use of Mayday emergency notification
devices could reduce the time its takes to discover a rural crash from an
average of 9.6 minutes to one minute.
- Advanced lane-keeping and collision-avoidance
technologies could prevent 19,000 crashes in rural areas every year due to
vehicles running off the road.
What
is the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative?
Where the metropolitan, the commercial vehicle
and the rural programs are focused primarily on the ITS infrastructure, the
Intelligent Vehicle Initiative aims to accelerate the development and availability
of advanced safety and information systems applied to all types of vehicles.
The goal is to integrate driver assistance and motorist information functions
so that vehicles operate more safely and effectively.
What
applications does the IVI cover?
It covers applications for passenger vehicles,
commercial trucks, buses, and specialized vehicles, such as snowplows. Other
special applications to emergency response, law enforcement, and highway maintenance
vehicles are also included. Many of these applications are based on ongoing
and recently completed research on crash avoidance, in-vehicle safety and automated
highway systems. Continuing research on human factors, and advanced driver warning
and vehicle control systems are a major thrust of the IVI.
What
is the IVI trying to achieve?
This initiative seeks to bring together public
and private stakeholders to ensure that in-vehicle systems are technologically,
socially, institutionally and economically viable. Partnerships with the motor
vehicle industry and its suppliers, states, government organizations, academic
institutions and other interested parties are being aggressively pursued.
What
are the benefits of the IVI?
- In-vehicle devices addressing lane-change, rear-end
and roadway-departure crashes are estimated to offset 1.1 million crashes
per year.
- In urban areas, 52,000 crashes could be prevented
annually by advanced lane-keeping and collision-avoidance technologies.
- Enhancements in nighttime and bad weather vision
applications may significantly improve drivers' abilities to stay in lanes
and distinguish hazards in the road.
What
is the Federal role in the ITS program?
The ITS infrastructure is ready now. In fact, ITS
products, services and technologies are already being implemented in states
and localities around the country. However, only pieces of the ITS infrastructure
are being put in at any given time, and in a narrowly focused, piecemeal fashion.
These individual applications of ITS technologies are actually fragmenting our
transportation networks instead of serving as a bridge to a new era. This pattern
brings great long-term risk of electronic "hardening" of these systems.
This fragmentation would take decades and billions of dollars to overcome.
To close the gap between the great potential that
ITS solutions have to offer and the current state of fragmentation, the United
States Department of Transportation is following a five-pronged strategy for
encouraging the development of technically integrated and institutionally coordinated
intelligent transportation systems.
Showcasing the benefits of ITS
The more exposure people have to useful products and services, the more likely
they are to understand, purchase and use them. Approximately one dozen sites
around the country have been funded to demonstrate the benefits of the ITS infrastructure.
These demonstrations aim to raise awareness of the capabilities of ITS technologies
and encourage public-sector officials to embrace and build locally applied ITS
infrastructure.
Creating funding incentives
Again, ITS is gaining momentum under existing surface transportation programs,
however, not in a consistent, optimal or systematic fashion. Temporary funding
incentives have proved to be dramatically effectively in halting fragmentation
and fostering technical integration and institutional coordination.
Establishing Technical Standards
Establishing technical standards that are in line with an overall national operating
framework -or architecture- is crucial to achieving technical "interoperability"
across the nation. In other words, without technical standards, state and local
governments, as well as consumers, would risk buying products that do not necessarily
work together or work in different parts of the country. By facilitating the
creation of technical standards, this risk is minimized and lower consumer prices
may result due to increased competition.
Building professional knowledge
When the Interstate highway construction program began, new skills in road building
and civil engineering were essential. ITS requires new skills in systems engineering,
electronics and communications to become a reality. Because our nation does
not currently have a sufficient number of professionals to support the effective
delivery of ITS, the Department of Transportation is actively carrying out an
ambitious Professional Capacity Building plan for education and training at
all levels.
Research
Research provides the basic tools and knowledge required to advance the implementation
of ITS and to continue to push the state-of-the-art to new heights. The Federal
interest in ongoing ITS research is to lead the development, testing and evaluation
of new technologies in order to accelerate their market availability. For ITS,
this means saving more lives, more time and more money-more quickly.
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