Cars collect data about traffic and road hazards. Should they share it?

The secret to avoiding red lights during rush hour in Utah’s largest city could be as simple as following a bus.

Transportation officials have spent the past few years refining a system in which radio transmitters inside shuttle buses talk directly to traffic signals in the Salt Lake City area, requesting a few extra seconds of green when they approach.

Congestion on these so-called smart streets is already noticeably smoother, but it’s just a small preview of the high-tech upgrades that could soon be coming to roads in Utah and eventually the US.

Backed by a $20 million federal grant and an ambitious call to “Connect the West,” the goal is to ensure that every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can eventually communicate with each other and roadside infrastructure about congestion, accidents. , road hazards and weather conditions.

With this knowledge, drivers can instantly know they should take a different route, bypassing the need for a human to manually send an alert to an electronic road sign or mapping apps found on mobile phones.

“A vehicle can tell us a lot about what’s happening on the roadway,” said Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe he braked really hard, or the windshield wipers are on, or the wheels are slipping. The machine anonymously transmits that data point to us 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”

When cars transmit real-time information to other cars and the various sensors posted along and above the road, the technology is generally known as vehicle-to-everything, or V2X. Last month, the US Department of Transportation unveiled a national plan for how state and local governments and private companies should implement the various V2X projects already in the works to ensure everyone is on the same page.

The overall objective is universal: to dramatically reduce road deaths and serious injuries, which have recently reached historic levels.

A 2016 review by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that V2X could help. Implementing just two of the earliest vehicle apps on anything nationwide would prevent 439,000 to 615,000 crashes and save 987 to 1,366 lives, his research found.

Dan Langenkamp has lobbied to improve road safety since his wife Sarah Langenkamp, ​​a US diplomat, was killed by a truck while cycling in Maryland in 2022. Joining officials at the news conference that announced the vehicle plan for everything, Langenkamp urged governments around the world. US to deploy the technology as widely and quickly as possible.

“How can we as government officials, as manufacturers and just as Americans not push this technology forward as fast as we can, knowing that we have the power to save ourselves from this disaster, this crisis on our roads,” he said.

Most of the public resistance has been related to privacy. Although the V2X launch plan is committed to protecting personal information, some privacy advocates remain skeptical.

Critics say that while the system may not track specific vehicles, it can compile enough identifying characteristics — even something as seemingly innocuous as tire pressure levels — that it wouldn’t take much work to figure out who find out who is behind the wheel and where they are. walking

“Once you get enough unique information, you can reasonably say that the car that’s driving down this street right now that’s in this particular weight class probably belongs to the mayor,” said Cliff Braun, associate director of technology, policy and research for Electronic. Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital privacy.

The federal plan says the nation’s top 75 metropolitan areas should aim to have at least 25 percent of their signalized intersections equipped with the technology by 2028, along with larger milestones in subsequent years. With its quick start, the Salt Lake City area has already surpassed 20%.

Of course, upgrading the signals is the relatively easy part. The most important data comes from the cars themselves. While most new ones have connected features, not all of them work the same.

Before launching into the “Connect the West” plan, Utah officials tested what they call the first radio-based connected vehicle technology using only data provided by fleet vehicles such as buses and snowplows. An early pilot program upgraded the bus route on a busy stretch of Redwood Road, and it wasn’t just bus riders who noticed a difference.

“Whatever they’re doing is working,” said Jenny Duenas, assistant director of nearby Panda Child Care, which enrolls 80 children between 6 weeks and 12 years old. “I haven’t seen traffic in a while. We have to transport our kids around here, so when it’s a lot more free, it’s a lot easier to get out of daycare.”

Casey Brock, bus communications supervisor for the Utah Transit Authority, said most of the changes may not be visible to drivers. However, even shaving a few seconds off a bus route can dramatically reduce congestion while improving safety, he said.

“From a commuter’s point of view, it can be, ‘Oh, I had a good traffic day,'” Brock said. “They don’t need to know all the mechanics that go on behind the scenes.”

This summer, Michigan opened a 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) stretch of a planned connected and automated vehicle corridor for Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The pilot project includes digital infrastructure, including sensors and cameras installed on poles along the highway, which will help drivers prepare for traffic slowdowns by sending notifications about things like debris and stalled vehicles.

Similar technology is being used for a smart freight corridor around Austin, Texas, which aims to inform truck drivers about road conditions and eventually respond to self-driving trucks.

Darran Anderson, director of strategy and innovation at the Texas Department of Transportation, said officials hope the technology not only boosts the state’s massive trucking industry, but also helps reverse a troubling trend that stretches for the better. for two decades. The last day without a death in Texas was November 7, 2000.

Cavnue, a Washington, DC-based subsidiary of Alphabet Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, funded the Michigan project and was awarded a contract to develop the Texas one. The company has set its sights on becoming an industry leader in smart road technology.

Chris Armstrong, Cavnue’s vice president of product, calls V2X “a digital seat belt for the car,” but says it only works if cars and road infrastructure can communicate seamlessly with each other.

“Instead of speaking 50 different languages, overnight we would all like to speak the same language,” he said.

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