Transportation Troubleshooting: Where Will Intelligent Transportation Systems Take Us Next?

We’ve all been there. You’re driving along a familiar road when the dreaded solid red line suddenly appears on your navigation screen, too late to seek an alternate route. You now have no choice but to wait while emergency crews clear the fender bender causing the backup.

Now, imagine a scenario in the near future where collisions are a rare occurrence. We’re on our way there, thanks to investments in transportation technologies and advances in vehicles of all types—cars, buses, trucks—all driving safely and smoothly throughout the transportation network with collision-avoidance features and system-wide harmonization of speeds and traffic flows.

ITS Potential

The current evolution of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) holds the potential to improve safety, reduce congestion, enhance driver experiences, cut carbon emissions, enable more-efficient asset management and provide other benefits not yet envisioned.

Innovations are possible everywhere in transportation, and agencies have been launching pilot projects for ITS equipment since the 1990s. A critical mass of real-world ITS deployments is on the horizon thanks to technological advancements in vehicles, sensors and software; funding; and growing expertise in ITS among transportation agencies and their consultants.

In my December 2023 Informed Infrastructure column, I covered an ITS use case on coordinated and adaptive ramp metering (CARM). CARM uses advanced sensors and software to elevate ramp metering to a corridor-wide system that adjusts metering at multiple locations to maximize traffic flow on the mainline and minimize on-ramp backups. CARM also allows vehicles to merge easier with traffic. The pilot projects that WSP and partner firms have conducted for Colorado and North Carolina show that CARM alone could reduce congestion and travel times by as much as 19 percent.

Full deployments of CARM are rare in the United States. However, California, Minnesota, Maryland and Arizona have versions of adaptive ramp metering in place, and I expect more jurisdictions to follow as they seek cost-effective solutions for reducing highway congestion and improving safety.

Traffic signals are evolving rapidly to leverage advanced ITS solutions. The city of Roswell, Ga., commissioned an automated traffic surveillance and control system that uses detector loops and cameras to monitor traffic through up to 16 intersections. Control-center operators adjust signals to ease congestion, give transit and emergency vehicles priority, and improve traffic flow and safety. This important tool will manage traffic for the Alpharetta Highway when incidents occur along State Route 400 or Interstate 285.

ITS Next

The next iterations of ITS will build on capabilities such as those used in CARM and signaling but will also leverage greater connectivity among vehicles, infrastructure and other devices.

“The leading edge in ITS is vehicle-to-infrastructure technology,” notes my colleague Virginia Lingham, P.E., WSP senior vice president and national ITS lead. “Also known as vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, this will improve safety on our roads—reducing or even eliminating crashes at intersections—and will allow transportation agencies to manage traffic with more immediacy and precision.”

Lingham and her colleagues are supporting all three of the “Saving Lives with Connectivity: Accelerating V2X Deployment” projects recently funded by USDOT. In Maricopa County, Ariz., the $19.6 million V2X project will connect 750 physical and virtual roadside units to about 400 transit, emergency and freight vehicles.

“Within 18 months of kickoff, we’ll be deploying at scale and operational to enable emergency-vehicle preemption, transit and freight prioritization, and detection of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, cyclists, people in wheelchairs and road workers,” adds Lingham.

WSP is working with Utah and Colorado to implement a $20 million grant to test V2X weather and curve-speed warnings, vulnerable road-user alerts and other capabilities throughout Utah, along I-80 in Wyoming and along I-70 and in Denver Metro in Colorado. There’s a friendly competition among the three sites to see who will be most successful at meeting USDOT goals. These grant awardees have a history of collaboration to advance these technologies, and I’m excited to see this take off.

Interoperability, security and privacy are just a few of the things that will be worked out with V2X deployment. But these issues can be managed. V2X will enable a vast increase in traffic-management capabilities. By communicating directly with vehicles and drivers, ITS with V2X can help prevent crashes, lessen red-light running, alert drivers to the presence of workers and vulnerable road users, and much more.

While technology, funding and expertise enable movement toward ITS, there needs to be greater urgency to lessen injuries and fatalities on U.S. roads.

“We can’t simply keep building additional lanes and operating as we have in the past,” observes Lingham. “We have to make the existing transportation systems safer for all users through operations, and that’s what this next wave of ITS can do.”

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