by James A. Bacon
The automobile industry is undergoing the greatest technological revolution since… well, probably since the invention of the automobile. Cars are getting “smarter,” as in embedded with more powerful sensors and artificial intelligence, and they are getting more connected — with other cars and with roads, which are getting smarter as well. The way people drive 10 years from now will be radically different from the way they drive today, especially if driverless cars become the norm.
Will Virginia be ready? That’s the question I frequently ask on this blog. I don’t know the answer, but I will say this: If Virginia is prepared a decade from now, it will owe a lot to the Connected Vehicle/Infrastructure University Transportation Center, a research consortium supported by Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Department of Transportation and Morgan State University.
Last week the Center strutted its stuff in Northern Virginia, putting on a demonstration of emerging connectivity technologies. Dave Forster has the story for the Virginian-Pilot:
To “connect” the car and the motorcycle, they equipped each with a small antenna and a black boxlike device. That allowed them to talk using what’s known as Dedicated Short Range Communications.
“Think of it as robust roadside Wi-Fi,” said Andrew Petersen, the director of technology development at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. …
Another device …looked like a large Wi-Fi router. … That was the roadside part of the equation. It sent alerts to the vehicles as they passed, including one for a work zone and another for a stopped vehicle.
VDOT has installed 43 of those devices on a stretch of Interstate 66 and nearby roads close to the Capital Beltway. For researchers, it’s a real-world lab to test and collect data with a fleet of 12 connected vehicles, including four motorcycles, a semitruck and two SUVs.
Technology connecting cars and smart roads will be widely available to the public within five to ten years, researchers predict. The potential exists to make roads a lot safer, and perhaps to squeeze more capacity out of the existing road network.
Right now, the commonwealth is ramping up to spend billions of dollars to address Virginia’s transportation needs based on the assumption that future roads will be as stupid as today’s roads, that the revolution in automobile/infrastructure technology won’t change much of anything. Why? Because transportation funding is driven by a bureaucratic process in which projects inch through endless review and funding hurdles. Once a project enters this pipeline, rarely is it dropped. Projects conceived today, based upon today’s technology and land-use realities, will be extruded through this process a decade or two from now, when the transportation environment will be totally different. It’s depressing to think how many billions of dollars will be mal-invested.
A critical transportation challenge at this juncture is to figure out how to make that approval process more flexible, allowing future administrations to yank projects that no longer make sense and to accelerate projects that do.
