Thinking Highways North America March 2007

THIN KING

HIG HW AYS NORTH AMERICAN EDITION Volume 2 • Issue 1 • April/May 2007

SUNNY SPELLS LATER

Amy Zuckerman and Al Gullon examine transportation’s role in our changing climate PUBLIC LIABILITY

Phil Tarnoff wonders if we are doing enough to cure the highway fatality pandemic

LEARNING ENABLED

GNSS goes back to school

UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH

Yuka Gomi, Rick Weiland and Valerie Shuman’s guide to ITS fallacies

SHARING THE LOAD

The plus-points of collocated TMCs the

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Foreword Thinking

Kevin Borras is publishing director of H3B Media and editor-in-chief of Thinking Highways North American Edition.

Back for good

There’s nothing quite like feeling entirely vindicated. Just ask KEVIN BORRAS. Or better still, let him tell you You really didn’t think that would be our one and only issue, did you? Shame on you, oh ye of little faith. If you’ve tried calling us over the past few months and been put through to our recorded selves and thought “where are they, then?” and imagined that we were scrabbling around for articles and adverts, then we forgive you. Since we launched Thinking Highways at the ITS World Congress our feet have barely touched the ground. We’ve spent many a long hour explaining our vision for a multimedia transportation future to a multitude of people and have so far received nothing but positive responses and reactions. To us, this is vindication that we have got the angle of approach right. There’s no need to take our word for it, either. How about this from a highly satisfied reader: “I actually need to force myself to get through many of these somewhat dry industry publications, it’s sort of a necessary evil. That is until now of course, and for that I am most grateful to you. Thanks for making it interesting for a change!”

Editor-in-Chief Kevin Borras ([email protected])

Valerie Shuman, Phil Tarnoff, Rick Weiland, Harold Worrall, Amy Zuckerman

Sales and Marketing Luis Hill ([email protected])

Sub-Editor and Proofreader Maria Vasconcelos

Design and Layout Phoebe Bentley, Kevin Borras

Subscriptions and Circulation Pilarin Harvey-Granell Visualisation Tom Waldschmidt Conferences and Events Odile Pignier Website Code Liquid

Guest Designers The Design Dell (pages 38-47) www.design-dell.co.uk Associate Editor Amy Zuckerman Contributing Editors Bruce Abernethy, Richard Bishop, Andrew Pickford, Phil Sayeg, Phil Tarnoff, Darryll Thomas, Harold Worrall Contributors to this issue Bruce Abernethy, Lisa Burgess, Jon Chambers, Pete Costello, Yuka Gomi, Bern Grush, Al Gullon, Zeljko Jeftic, Mark Johnson, Bob Kelly, Paul Kompfner, Greg Krueger, Paul Najarian,

Financial Director Martin Brookstein EDITORIAL AND ADVERTISING H3B Media Ltd, 15 Onslow Gardens, Wallington, Surrey SM6 9QL, UK Tel +44 (0)870 919 3770 Fax +44 (0)870 919 3771 Email [email protected]

www.h3bmedia.com

Or this from an industry expert: “Your first issue contained some of the most fascinating and thoughtprovoking articles I’ve read in years. We all know that a lot of this technology is brilliant, but the real brilliance is in how you implement and integrate it. Marvellous stuff!” These were just two of dozens of congratulatory emails and calls we’ve received (and we also got a lovely hand-written letter from Thailand) and we’re now hoping that this next batch of three issues (including Thinking Highways Europe/ Rest of the World and our road pricing title, ETC, etc, will illicit such similarly heart-warming correspondence. However, you won’t find out if you don’t register! Just go to the H3B Media TransPortal at www.h3bmedia.com and it’ll only take you a minute. While you are there, I’d like to invite you to also register for the online versions of all three of our titles as well.You read them just like you would a printed magazine; they load almost instantly as they open as images in your web browser; Thinking Highways

they are ‘published’ up to two weeks before the printed versions and you can have free access to the Europe/Rest of the World edition, too. What more incentive do you need? Other highly innovative features will be and indeed are available on the TransPortal so please take a look. Two notes of differing fortune to end on. Firstly, the sad news that James Joseph, one of our contributing editors, died last month. His obituary appears on page 16. The good news is that we are delighted to welcome awardwinning author, journalist and consultant Amy Zuckerman as associate editor. Besides producing her usual thoughtful content for the publication, Amy will be developing conferences worldwide for H3B Media on the theme of traffic management and climate control.You will find two articles on this subject in this edition, one by Amy, who has also written a startling piece on truck security. Finally, if you’d like to contribute something to our June issue, please give it some thought... TH

is published by H3B Media Ltd.

ISSN 1753-43Z1 Thinking Highways is published quarterly in two editions – North America and Europe/Rest of the World - and is available on subscription at £30/€40 (Europe/RoW) and US$60 (North America). Distributed in the USA by DSW 75 Aberdeen Road, Emigsville, PA 17318-0437 USA. Periodicals postage paid at Emigsville, PA. POSTMASTER: send address changes to Thinking Highways, 401 S W Water Street, Suite 201B, Peoria, Illinois 61602, USA.

Managing Director Luis Hill Publishing Director Kevin Borras www.h3bmedia.com

Although due care has been taken to ensure that the content of this publication is accurate and up-to-date, the publisher can accept no liability for errors and omissions. Unless otherwise stated, this publication has not tested products or services that are described herein, and their inclusion does not imply any form of endorsement. By accepting advertisements in this publication, the publisher does not warrant their accuracy, nor accept responsibility for their contents. The publisher welcomes unsolicited manuscripts and illustrations but can accept no liability for their safe return. © 2007 H3B Media Ltd. All rights reserved. The views and opinions of the authors are not necessarily those of H3B Media Ltd. Reproduction (in whole or in part) of any text, photograph or illustration contained in this publication without the written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited. Printed in the UK by Stones the Printers

Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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COLUMNS Bob Kelly and Mark Johnson

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Paul Najarian’s Connected World

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Harold Worrall’s Bright Ideas

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OBITUARY James Joseph, 1924-2007

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CONTENTS

THE THINKER ITS guru Phil Tarnoff’s thoughts on the 21st Century’s ‘forgotten’ killing fields: highways.

COVER STORY

Far from being one of the causes of global warming, Amy Zuckerman suggests that transportation could be helping the climate Al Gullon gives the whole transportation and climate change debate a politically scientific angle Homeland Security

The people or their sun?

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

Cover Story The question, “Why is there another global warming article in Thinking Highways?” was answered just as I finally started to put my thoughts onto paper. The radio reported on the UK’s “60 per cent by 2050” announcement and the news was not good on two fronts, except for those moved more by faith or photo opportunities than science. Not good, because that grandiose goal ignores both the economic benefits of improving productivity – for every member of our human society – and, with respect to the required/expected improvements in fuel efficiency, the iron ‘law of diminishing returns’, not to mention several past and recent scientific developments. Not good, because of the probability that the pursuit of such a false and unattainable goal will divert material and human resources, in the ITS community as elsewhere, into dead ends (e.g. CO2 payments to governments who have so abused both their citizens and their economy that their productivity is already in decline) at the same time as everyone’s standard of living declines in tempo with decreasing productivity.

Enough of the ‘why’, now for the ‘what’

When the Kyoto Accord and the working methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first came to my attention I was, pensioned off after 23 years as a technocrat with Environment Canada, initially very understanding, even sympathetic, at seeing the work of the climatologists severely misrepresented in summaries and sound bites prepared by the politicians. Later, when it appeared that at least some of my fellow scientists were pre-misrepresenting their work in order

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In the second of our features looking at transportation’s role in our changing climate, AL GULLON , a specialist in i i i

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BIOMETRICS Amy Zuckerman on TWIC, the hottest topic in commercial transportation THINKING DIFFERENTLY Bern Grush looks at how the different schools of thought at work in the world of GNSS aren’t really helping its global take-up. A 10-page feature created by The Design Dell

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TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT Lisa Burgess and Jon Chambers on the pros and (so far no) cons of collocated TMCs

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CHINA A traffic and transport travelogue, courtesy of Bruce Abernethy and his digital camera

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CO-OPERATIVE VEHICLE INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS Is CVIS Europe’s version of VII or is that doing both a dis-service? ERTICO’s Paul Kompfner and Zeljko Jeftic explain 76

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DSRC Thinking Highways talks to some of the industry’s major players for the lowdown on DSRC WAVE 80

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TELEMATICS Ever wondered what four things are holding back the telematics industry? Yuka Gomi, Rick Weiland and Valerie Shuman elucidate VEHICLE INFRASTRUCTURE INTEGRATION Greg Krueger focuses on the infrastructure side of VII with a look at Michigan DOT’s literally ground-breaking camera lowering project Advertisers Index

THE THOUGHT PROCESS Pete Costello, ITS Program Manager, PBS&J

www.h3bmedia.com

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Robert Kelly and Mark Johnson

No jam today Are we entering a new era for private involvement in transportation? In May 2006, the US Department of Transportation (DOT or Department) announced a multi-prong initiative to alleviate congestion in the United States. Originating in 2005’s SAFETEA-LU (Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users) legislation, the “National Strategy to Reduce Congestion on America’s Transportation Network” program targets congestion on highways, urban roadways, shipping corridors (trucks and waterways) and airports. Initial project proposals are due to DOT at the end of April 2007 for metropolitan areas to test congestion mitigation solutions. Previous federal transportation legislation has included programs and dedicated funding intended to alleviate congestion. What appears new in the most recent anti-congestion program is the apparent emphasis on soliciting private sector investment and management, but just how far the Department is willing to accept private sector involvement is not yet known. Multiple factors are cited by DOT for seeking greater private sector involvement. Highway congestion has increased significantly, both in extent and duration. Transportation infrastructure is aging and construction costs for new capacity are escalating. At the same time, federal and state governments

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are facing competing spending priorities and voter resistance to new taxes. Many states are facing a backlog of unfunded transportation projects or “unfunded liabilities,” both for maintenance of existing infrastructure and new construction. The Department

“USDOT cites several benefits from increased private participation in transportation projects” notes also that the federal gasoline tax was last raised in 1993 and, accordingly, has lost much of its “purchasing power.” In addition, increased vehicle fuel efficiency has resulted in less revenue per mile of usage. If the present level of gas tax is not raised, it is estimated that the Federal Highway Account will either be empty or in the red by the end of Fiscal Year 2009. These conditions are not necessarily new and not unknown previously. However, what appears new in the Department’s thinking is the conclusion that the current transportation system is functioning poorly (i.e., increasing congestion) because of a lack of pricing. This conclusion, moreover, has apparently led the Department to seek new vehicles for private sector investment and

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management. DOT has long had in place multiple programs and mechanisms to attract private sector investment, such as Private Activity Bonds, designbuild contracting, State Infrastructure Banks, and TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act). Indeed, in succeeding transportation bills, Congress has provided increasing amounts of funding and expanded the universe of eligible projects. These existing programs, however, are designed primarily to attract private capital but not private management and financial controls. According to DOT emerging tolling technologies make it possible to address both funding shortfalls as well as use demand management techniques to improve system performance. DOT’s congestion mitigation program includes grants for deployment of “value pricing,” “HOT lanes,” and other ITS technologies that have shown an ability to mitigate congestion. DOT cites several benefits from increased private participation in transportation projects. According to DOT, the private sector is able to provide more certainly on timing, both for accelerating project start-up and timely completion. More private investment frees up state and federal resources for other priorities and helps to address needs that cannot be met with existing public funding. In addition, the risk of cost

Robert Kelly is a partner with the Washington, DC based law firm Squire, Sanders, Dempsey

Mark Johnson is an attorney at law with Squire, Sanders, Dempsey’s Buenos Aires, Argentina office

www.h3bmedia.com

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overruns can be shifted from state and local governments to the private sector. Finally, as noted above, the private sector brings improved operational efficiency through greater use of pricing mechanisms. Despite this apparent new emphasis on garnering more private sector involvement, it is not clear how far the Department is willing to go. There are still significant restrictions on where and how states deploy tolling and, by extension, new pricing mechanisms. New tolls can be deployed on new infrastructure. Existing tolls can be updated with new technologies. Absent new legislative authority, new tolls – and pricing mechanisms – generally cannot be added to existing infrastructure.

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Moreover, public acceptance of increased use of tolling in the United States is not strong. The public is accustomed to paying fuel taxes. Tolls, especially new tolling deployments, are often viewed as a secondary tax on top of what is already paid in the form of fuel taxes. Electronic tolling has made an impact, especially in large urban areas such as New York City, but that region already had extensive tolling for many years prior to the introduction of the E-Z Pass system. There is also some question as to the form of private sector involvement. Clearly, the Department is looking for increased financial investment from the private sector, both directly and through its existing funding programs. The Department, however, notes that many states’ laws restrict private sector involvement in so-called “public-private partnerships” (PPPs) for transportation. The three states with the most comprehensive laws for PPPs, Florida, Texas and Virginia, have also received the most private investment. DOT calls on other states to

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liberalize their laws and regulations to make it easier to attract private investment. The Department cites three specific examples of existing PPPs: long-term lease to operate existing facilities; reconstruction and/or expansion and operation of existing facilities; and construction and operation of new facilities. The first of these, the longterm lease, is not without controversy. The leading example is probably the Indiana Toll Road. In April 2006, the state signed a 75-year lease with a SpanishAustralian consortium, which will operate, maintain and improve the 157-mile highway. The consortium paid the state US$3.85billion at the outset, which the state plans to use to fund a backlog of some 200 other transportation projects. There was some opposition in the state to the deal, some of it based on the fact that the Toll Road was being “sold” to a non-American entity and uncertainty as to the potential long-term risk to the state. In addition, there was some concern that the lease permitted the consortium to raise the amount of the tolls (although only upon application to the state and to specific levels). Whether the Indiana Toll Road deal is a harbinger of many more such deals in the United States is not yet known. The Department of Transportation, however, is clearly pushing for more private sector investment and management in transportation projects, and seems open as to the potential form and structure of such involvement. Moreover, the Department is relying on the benefits available from new tolling and pricing technologies as a critical development that makes private investment – and the potential returns – more attractive. TH www.h3bmedia.com

Paul Paul Najarian’s Najarian Connected World

Generation game Incident management is progressing from Basic 911 to NG9-1-1 Recent announcements by New York City 911 stating that they are now able to receive cell phone images and videos from the public as an added tool for incident management, emergency response or fighting crime prompts a review of the progress made from Basic 911 to Next Generation 911. It is difficult and lengthy to assemble all the information in a short paper as there are many facets to this progression. For example, one could simply address the legislative aspects, or the regulatory implications, or the technological advances in this field, or the implementation from a Public Safety Answering Points’ (PSAP) perspective, or the institutional issues. One thing for sure is that these facets are not exclusive of one another. In the United States, 911 is the universal emergency assistance number. The 911 service (or Basic 911) did not become truly universal until the passage of the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 (“911 Act”). One provision of the 911 Act directed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make 911 the universal emergency number for all telephone services. Where other emergency numbers had been used, the FCC was directed to establish appropriate transition periods for areas in which 911 was not

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in use as an emergency telephone number. Based on their reports, wireless carriers have virtually completed the transition to 911 as the national emergency number. State and local authorities continue to expand 911 coverage and upgrade 911

“One thing for sure is that these facets are not exclusive of one another” service. Although there may be some counties that still do not have basic 911 service, wireless carriers can deliver 911 calls to the appropriate local emergency authority.

Paul Najarian was director of telecoms at ITS America from 1996-2006. He can be contacted via email: [email protected]

to the FCC. The NPRM called for a twophase implementation of E911. Under Phase I, wireless carriers were required to provide the PSAPs with a callback number and the location of the nearest cell cite (or sector) receiving a 911 call. An 1 April 1998 deadline was set for Phase I; which may be described as a “caller-ID.” The Phase II implementation required wireless carriers to provide to PSAPs the location of all 911 calls by longitude and latitude beginning 1 October 2001. A location accuracy requirement of 100m for 67 per cent of the calls, and 300m for 95 per cent of the calls was established as a criteria or guideline.

Phased array

The Phase I and II plans were developed as a Consensus Although the statutory Agreement, filed with the FCC, authority to mandate a between the Cellular universal (Basic) 911 system Telecommunications and was not executed legislatively Internet Association (CTIA) until 1999, the Federal and three Public Safety Communications Commission organizations (the Association (FCC) had already initiated a of Public-Safety Communiregulatory proceeding to cations Officials International implement a wireless (APCO), the National Enhanced 911 (E911) back in Emergency Number 1994. Association (NENA), and the On 19 October 1994, the FCC National Association of State issued a Notice of Proposed Nine One One Administrators Rulemaking (NPRM) for E911. (NASNA)). This docket, registered as No. The FCC decided to rely on 94-102, has already received this Consensus Agreement for nearly 7,000 public filings, and the industry to monitor and possibly holds a record for the police itself, rather than number of waivers submitted establish strict enforcement.

Proceeding wirelessly

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This, however, resulted in a record number of waiver requests by wireless carriers and manufacturers as the established deadlines for the phased implementation were rarely met, except for a handful of locations. From a technological perspective, the debate centered on who and what technology can best meet the Automatic Location Identification (ALI) requirements for Phase II, noting that the Phase I Automatic Number Identification (ANI) was fairly straight forward.

Arrival information

The debate between Time of Arrival (TOA) and Angle of Arrival (AOA) algorithms was quite substantial among the companies involved and their associated patents. Both TOA and AOA dictated a networkbased implementation where a triangulation technique with cell sites was used to locate a caller. Technological advances also allowed for the development of handsetbased solutions with embedded GPS chipsets. As a result, on 6 October 1999, the FCC issued a third Report & Order in the 94-102 docket to accommodate a handsetbased solution with stricter accuracy requirement to 50m for 67 per cent of the calls, and 150m for 95 per cent. It also established market penetration requirements and milestones for handset-based solution providers. With the new requirements in place, the lines were clearly drawn among carriers and handset manufacturers who designated a network-based solution and those who designated a handset-based solution. Regardless of the solution, however, the technologies associated with E911 were (and still are) extremely vital for the delivery of Location

Based Services (LBS) and telematics applications. The Intelligent Vehicle Highway Society (IVHS-America), currently known as ITS America, recognized the importance of the E911 docket with filings with the FCC, as far back as 1994. In its filings, IVHS-America stressed the need for a rapid and ubiquitous deployment of E911 as a critical enabler of ITS services and applications.

Adopt and deploy

Although the FCC adopted a number of Orders in October 2001 to reassert its enforcement authority, the deployment and rollout of E911 is largely governed by decisions on request for waivers. Recognizing that 911 (or E911) does not fall under the jurisdiction of any of the

“In FY2004, the USDOT had decided on a tiered approach for the selection of ITS initiatives” Administration’s Departments, the US Department of Transportation stepped in to facilitate a consensus building role between the wireless carriers and the public safety organizations. A Secretarial Initiative for Wireless E911 was established and a report published to educate state and local governments and PSAPs on the benefits of wireless E911 services. As a result of the Secretarial Initiative and other activities, a major theme began to emerge. Wireless E911 is a national issue that requires national and federal attention coupled with critical funding; however, Wireless E911 is funded, deployed and operated at the local level.

Language talk

Section 3011 (Enhance 911) of the “Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005” (Public Law 109171, Title III of the “Deficit Reduction Act of 2005”) provides the statutory language and associated funding for the establishment of a E-911 Implementation Coordination Office (ICO). Congress requested that the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) jointly establish the E-911 ICO. US$43.5m were made available by Congress. In September 2006, the US$13.7billion proceeds from the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum auctions in the 1710-1755 MHz band were the source of funding for the ICO. In Fiscal Year 2004, the US Department of Transportation had decided on a tiered approach for the selection of ITS initiatives. The initiatives, which were entirely technology-based, required a clear federal role and an associated publicprivate partnership. The first nine major initiatives (or Tier 1 initiatives), that could make an immediate impact, were announced at the 2004 ITS America Annual Meeting.

No great surprise

Next Generation 911, which, at the time of the announcement, was not clearly defined, was among the nine major initiatives. While the industry was still addressing various Wireless E911 challenges, such as deployment of E911, routing of Automatic Collision Notification (ACN) calls, sunsetting of analog cellular infrastructure, the announcement was not a total surprise as the program and US DOT’s continued leadership role in

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Paul Najarian’s Connected World In other words, the joint ICO has no jurisdiction or oversight of the NG9-1-1 program. A Congressional amendment may be required in order to give the joint ICO any say regarding NG9-1-1. Meanwhile, US DOT has moved ahead with the development of a system architecture for NG9-1-1 and a contract award in December 2006, while no grants have been disbursed for Wireless E911 by the joint ICO.

Emergency debate

“Many things have evolved from Basic 911 to NG9-1-1 across all the facets of the program” the E911 program were quite visionary. The wireless industry was now facing new challenges from wireless data networks, and voice networks that employ Voice-over-the Internet Protocol (VoIP). These challenges require a new approach for the delivery of E911 services; hence the Next Generation 911 initiative.

Validation process

As a first step, the USDOT published a preliminary concept of operations for NG9-1-1. And, in December 2006, it issued a two-year contract, valued at US$4.4m, to Booz Allen Hamilton to develop and validate the requirements for the NG9-1-1 system, define a system

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architecture, and develop a transition plan for implementing nationwide IPbased emergency services. Although NG9-1-1 appears to be the next logical progression to Wireless E911, programmatically they are separate and distinct. The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005, which established the joint NTIA/NHTSA E-911 ICO, was signed into law in February 2006. The statute and language are very clear and specific about E911. Among its activities, the joint ICO is to develop grant criteria and disburse grant funds from the US$43.5m allocation, for the deployment of Wireless E911. The statute is totally silent about NG9-1-1.

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Many things have evolved from Basic 911 to NG9-1-1 across all the facets of the program (legislative, regulatory, technological, deployment, and institutional). For example, the technical debate that once raged between TOA versus AOA, or between network-based versus handset-based solutions, has now shifted over to the Emergency Services Interconnection Forum (a joint standardization forum under the auspices of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solution (ATIS) and NENA)). An ESIF subcommittee on Next Generation Emergency Services is now defining the requirements for and specifications of an IPMultimedia Subsystem (IMS) functional architecture for NG9-1-1. So, instead of TOA and AOA, the new technical challenges are IMS and VoIP. Over the past 13 years (since the opening of the FCC’s NPRM in docket 94-102), a couple of challenges have consistently remained, while the program has evolved from Basic to NG9-1-1. NG9-1-1 is not a state and local problem. It is a national problem that requires a national solution, including funding. While NG9-1-1 is technically feasible, Next Generation 911 cannot be implemented without next generation of thinking. TH www.h3bmedia.com

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Harold Worrall’s Bright Ideas

Harold Worrall’s Bright Ideas

Are you sitting comfortably? US concessions: so what happens when the music stops? Who’ll be left chairless? The parlour game of musical chairs is played with a number of people seated when the music begins the participants walk or dance around the chairs until the music stops whereupon everyone scrambles for a seat. The catch is that each time the music starts, one chair is removed. Consequently, one person in the group is left standing without a seat and they are removed from the game. Who is likely to left standing in the development of US concessions? When the project has fully matured and all costs and revenues are known, who

will be the winners and losers. Recent articles by financial experts have projected that the original equity investment in some US brownfield projects will be returned in just over a decade of operation as original equity is replaced with increasing debt and new equity investors. Greenfield projects are also under public pressure. A recent public audit was quite critical of the negotiations process for a major US project. The audit was critical of the lack of public knowledge of the negotiations and the “true cost” of the project in interest cost and equity return.

Political fudge

Concession investments tend to be somewhat complex and for most citizens, it is difficult to understand what is lost or gained when political leaders allow toll facilities to be leased on a long term basis or when large greenfield projects are negotiated behind closed doors. Since these projects have traditionally been in the public domain, it is difficult to understand these new approaches to transportation infrastructure development. Understandably the public may be concerned about being the last person standing when the music stops. Who is likely to be without a chair? Will it be the company that paid too much for a property, the investors who put money into the project or will it be the public? Partial answers to this question are becoming evident.

All about the gas

To understand the public concerns, we must understand the history of transportation in the US. Since 1916 transportation has been funded by the gasoline tax. It paid for the massive “hard road” construction of the 1920s and 30s and the interstate highway system that is still the envy of economically developing countries. All of that infrastructure now has to be maintained from gas tax funding. In addition, new capacity has to be built to

Dr Harold Worrall is president of Transportation Innovations and is past chair of ITS Florida, ITS America and the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA). From 1992 until 2004 he was executive director of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority

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Paul Harold Najarian Worrall’s Bright Ideas relieve congestion and compete with China, India and the EU. Gasoline tax as a funding source has however “hit the wall” politically. There is little support for further increases in that source. It is a nonstarter in most if not all political circles and there is a trend toward direct user fees. Another solution is for government to borrow the money needed. For the last half of the 20th century the US did just that. The Pennsylvania turnpike showed the way as a precursor to the interstate system and was followed by New Jersey, New York, Florida and other states during the 1950s and 60s. In addition to turnpikes, urban expressways began to appear especially in states where growth occurred mostly in the last half of the 20th Century.

Roll out the barrel

The federal government has only recently begun to consider the option of borrowing to build infrastructure. The history has been one of “cash on the barrel head.” The attraction of private capital as a partial solution to the transportation funding gap is a relatively recent development. From discussion in the 1990s, Public Private Partnerhships, PPP have become the solution of choice. New York investment banks were traditionally engaged in supporting the sale of tax exempt debt for the toll industry. Now they are engaged in accumulating private equity commitments for infrastructure investment. Most have raised US$3-4billion in commitments. Considering the rule of thumb that concession investments are structured with 25 per cent equity and 75 per cent private debt, considerable infrastructure funds are

14

available for the US market and this excludes the considerable funds available from Europe and Australia.

Mind the gap

If US$100billion in equity commitments have been raised in the US and a similar amount is available outside the US, there is nearly US$1trillion available for transportation investment in the US. There is a large funding gap in the US and there appears to be a large source of private capital available to fill the gap, so what is the problem? The first major concessions in the US have been long term leases of existing toll facilities and Brownfield projects. These long term leases lead to many questions. The term of the lease is well beyond any reasonable planning horizon where some level of predictability exists. The lease amounts have been surprisingly high and there has been concern about foreign ownership of public assets and a general loss of public input.

Take your seat

So who is likely to be left without a chair? To answer this we must delve into the deal structure. First, each project has its own corporate structure. This limits the risk to the major concessionaire to the amount of the original investment. Large fees are extracted from the new project corporation up front for constructing the deal and as the project matures, rates are raised, efficiencies are implemented and profits are maximized. Accordingly, the return on investment increases. It is the old story of using other people’s money to make money. As original equity funds are reduced, they are replaced by a commensurate amount of debt.

Vol 2 No 1 Thinking Highways

Failure rate

So what happens if the project begins to fail because the rate increases are so severe that the traffic begins to reduce and it becomes difficult to support the dividend expectations for equity investors and the need to pay the costs of debt? Because many of the facilities under long term leases have a history of not increasing toll rates for extended periods, there is a considerable amount of toll rate elasticity built in to the project. As the lessor begins to increase rates, there will be a point beyond which increasing rates will not maximize revenue. Who is without a chair at this point? Since this will likely not occur for some time after the closing of the lease, the original investors will likely be financially whole, will have collected significant up front fees and will have resold the debt and even the equity interests several times. The blank space where a chair once sat seems to be reserved for those who purchase a share of the equity from the original investor and may not even be reserved for the debt purchaser if the circumstances become deteriorated enough to take out the equity holders. This is not to say that all concessions, private equity approaches or even Brownfield leases should be avoided. It simply says that the public sector who is entering into concession projects of any kind must always keep the long term interests of the public in a first priority position. What may appear as a great deal today, may look less so over time. Renegotiation provisions and maintaining the financial risk with the initial investor should be an inherent consideration. TH This article also appears in a different form in ETC, etc

*UPITER3YSTEMS0ROVIDES #OMPREHENSIVE#OMMAND AND#ONTROL6ISUALIZATION 3OLUTIONSFORTHE 4RAFFIC#ONTROL)NDUSTRY

*UPITER3YSTEMSOFFERSTHEBROADESTRANGEOFPROCESSORSFORCOMMANDANDCONTROLAPPLICATIONS &ROMTRAFFICMANAGEMENTCENTERSTOEMERGENCYRESPONSECENTERS ANDFROMSECURITYTODEFENSE *UPITER CAN SATISFY ANY CONFIGURATION AND BUDGET REQUIREMENT WITH SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY AND EXCELLENTVALUE &/2-/2%).&/2-!4)/.'/4/ 777*50)4%2#/- %-!),).&/ *50)4%2#/- /2#!,,  

Obituary

James Joseph KEVIN BORRAS reflects on the life of a prolific and prodigious journalist and author who lost his three-year battle with cancer last month. James Joseph, who died in February at the age of 82, was rather more than just a Contributing Editor to this magazine. He was, without being too overly sentimental, an inspiration. An excellent writer and a thoroughly decent man. A couple of years ago, while making regular contributions to my tenure as editor of another magazine, Jim called me to say that he was going to be a day late with his article, which for him was mightily unusual. Presuming he was just too busy developing a TV script or book idea, I was taken aback at his reason. “I’m having chaemotherapy this afternoon and it knocks me back a fair bit. I’ll have it over to you by tomorrow, is that OK?” What can you say to that? “Are you sure?” was my rather pathetic response. “Of course,” he replied. “I’ve got cancer of he vocal chords, not the fingers. The fact that he spent the last three years of his life with only one working vocal chord just seemed to add character to his voice but extra character was one thing that Jim Joseph didn’t need. He wrote more than 25 non-fiction books on subjects as diverse as autodetailing (which he described as a ‘book about cleaning your car’), the secrets to living in a house with a swimming pool (brilliantly entitled ‘Poolside Living’) and an exposé of skulduggery and moneylaundering in the Californian funeral parlour business. He was also the author of over 2000 articles, 42 of which I had the pleasure of publishing.The last things Jim wrote for me where a piece on ethanol entitled “Cane and Able” that appeared in the first issues of both editions of Thinking Highways, and “As the world watches...” an article that detailed Oregon DOT’s distance-driven tax, in the first issue of ETC, etc. I first met Jim in a departure lounge at London’s Gatwick Airport in May 1998. I was flying out to Detroit for my first ITS America Annual Meeting, Jim was going home to LA after spending a week in the UK researching a book. We got talking, one thing lead to another and after showing me a bright red, sleeveless sweater he’d bought at Selfridges, he offered to write a story for me. Six months later he sent me an article that I couldn’t open. I emailed him back to ask what program he’d written it in. “WordStar,” he said, much to my amazement. Four years later, having not met during the intervening period, we agreed to meet at the Long Beach Convention Centre after the 2002 ITS America Annual Meeting.

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Jim Joseph with his companion Lillian Miller

Jim had invited me to stay with him for a night after the event. As it turned out, the event was yet to come. Upon entering his apartment in Brentwood, a reasonably feasible stone’s throw from Hollywood, I began to think that I had been taken not to where he lived but to a magazine warehouse. One entire wall from floor to ceiling was taken up with binders, folders and holders full of every kind of technical publication you could imagine. “I have every single copy of Popular Mechanics dating back to 1930-something, in chronological order,” he said proudly. As someone who keeps his collection of over 3000 CDs in alphabetical order I was highly delighted to discover that his library of more typically disposable items were similarly filed and stored. “I need to know where to find them quickly,” he said. “There’s no point wanting to look something up on Tuesday and to still be looking for it on Friday.” He then showed me his office. We slipped carefully through a small gap between two six-foot high towers of storage boxes and into a space barely big enough for two people, a desk, a printer, a fax, a phone and a computer that looked old enough to have launched Apollo 13. He then took me into the spare room that I was to stay in. I say spare room, it was more an extension of his library combined with an extension of his wardrobe. “Let me show you something,” he said, “and passed me a cardboard storage box. On it was a typed label (in WordStar, of course) that read “Sweaters, Red”. It was, naturally, between boxes marked “Sweaters, Pink” and “Sweaters, Taupe”. “Have a look at the fourth one down, I think.” I took out the fourth sweater which was in a clear plastic wrapper. On it was another label, this time bearing the words: ‘May 1998, Selfridges, London.’ TH www.h3bmedia.com

Driving Life Leading the world in technology solutions for safety and mobility All too often we communicate with other drivers only by flashing lights, sounding horns, making brief eye contact, and with short gestures. But for the most part, we remain unaware of interesting and important information from other road users. Volkswagen is using new communication technologies that actually enable vehicles to communicate with each other and with the infrastructure. The result is a qualified exchange of information that ensures greater safety, efficiency, comfort and driving enjoyment. For example, vehicle-to-vehicle communication can warn of traffic hold-ups like the end of a traffic jam just around the curve ahead. Communicating road signs can actively inform drivers of potential hazard zones and make those data available in the vehicle. We predict that direct communication and conversations between vehicles will be considered completely normal in the not-too-distant future.

The Thinker

N A

E W

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

C

? W O N

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www.h3bmedia.com

The Thinker Highway safety is never a subject to be taken lightly. PHIL TARNOFF suggests that automobile fatalities have become a pandemic that we just aren’t doing enough to eradicate

On 19 September 2006, MSNBC reported that a serious E. coli outbreak linked to spinach had occurred in the United States. The report indicted that one (possibly two) deaths were being investigated by Federal officials. Ultimately, three unfortunate souls succumbed to the E. coli bacteria, an event that was covered by all of the major media outlets. During the two month period that the “spinach problem” was receiving elevated attention, approximately 7,200 individuals died in automobile accidents within the US and 200,000 died worldwide without any media attention. Have we become desensitized to automobile fatalities since they are so frequent? While even a single fatality is not to be taken lightly, the statistics of highway death and destruction defy comparisons with the impacts of E. coli bacteria. In fact, they even defy comparisons with the effects of war and starvation. As shown in table 1 (reproduced from Reference 1), the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that over the past ten years the worldwide life shortening consequences of automobile accidents have risen from ninth place to third place, ahead of war (eighth place) and HIV (tenth place). Consider the statistics: In 2005, there were more than 43,000 fatalities in the US and nearly 1.2m fatalities worldwide annually. The number of injuries in auto accidents is equally staggering with nearly 40m injured worldwide. A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population. Clearly, because of the worldwide death and injury rates, auto safety can be considered a pandemic. Yet the policy and investment emphasis placed on this pandemic by most governments worldwide is dwarfed by the focus on other life threatening concerns which often pose less serious societal problems.

The pandemic can be cured

The most compelling evidence that solutions to the highway safety pandemic exist, can be found in the safety initiatives successfully implemented in Victoria, Australia during the period of 1989 through 2004. Detailed descriptions of the Victoria program exist elsewhere, and should be required reading for legislators as well as the general public since a program such as the one implemented by the Australians requires comprehensive policy support. The success of the Australian program is enviable. Since its inception, the fatality rate in Victoria has dropped from approximately 22.5 deaths per 100,000 population to 9 deaths per 100,000 population; a decrease of 60 per cent to just over half of the US fatality rate. These impressive results were achieved through the combined support of public agency and political officials, with majority (although far from unanimous) public support for a comprehensive program that spanned the three E’s of safety; education, enforcement and engineering. The success of the program was further ensured through strong legislative support and ultimately, continuous performance measurement. This program deserves particular attention in the US, since Australia, like the US is a “federation, but mostly because www.h3bmedia.com

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The Thinker

“ Excessive speed and alcoholism are major highway safety problems, yet there is demonstrated evidence that they are tractable”

it is part of the “new world” where urban form, regional development, and road transport developed more or less contemporaneously.” Highlights of the Victoria program include: • Legislation which increased police powers,increased penalties and clarified existing regulations. This legislation included a zero blood alcohol requirement, increase of the probationary license period from two to three years, compulsory helmets for bicyclists, and immediate license loss for second drunk driving offenses; • Greatly increased speed enforcement including extensive use of speed photo enforcement. • Increased random breath testing for detection of drunk drivers by a factor of five. Statistically, this means that one in three drivers in Victoria can expect to be stopped each year. • Introduced a long-term program of public education in support of specific safety initiatives, in order to maintain the visibility of traffic safety with the public. In summary, three overall factors can be identified as having contributed to the success in Victoria: 1. A sound and realistic plan (more about this later); 2. Political and bureaucratic leadership which recognizes that the enforcement and engineering cannot accomplish their goals without an underlying legislative mandate as well as adequate funding; 3. Integrated implementation in which the three E’s are used to complement each other The Australian program is not alone in its successful improvement of highway safety. However, it provides an

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invaluable example of the potential benefits of a fully integrated program with a foundation of strong legislative support. Equally important, rather than expending resources chasing a large number of safety issues, the program focuses the major causes of traffic fatalities; speed and alcohol.

A focus on speed and drunk driving

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), speed and drunk driving accounted for 30 per cent and 40 per cent of fatal crashes annually. Obviously these percentages are not additive, since approximately 40 per cent of the fatal speed related crashes involved drivers with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of .08 grams per deciliter (g/dL) or higher. Adjusting for this double counting, it can be concluded that taken together speed and alcohol account for approximately 58 per cent of the fatal crashes in the US, and significant reductions in these two areas alone, will have a significant impact on highway fatalities. Obviously there are other potential focus areas for improvements can be realized including young drivers and pedestrians. Speed and alcohol also received the greatest emphasis in the Victoria program. In the US and elsewhere, there is a debate regarding the relative value of lower speed limits vs. reduced speed variance (speed differentials among vehicles sharing the same roadway). While there is evidence to support the safety benefits of both, it goes without saying that the value of existing fixed regulatory signing www.h3bmedia.com

The Thinker vailing traffic and roadway conditions. Here again, the variable speed limit must be accompanied by an intensified enforcement program. This approach is likely to produce the highest level of public acceptance for increased enforcement (including the use of automated techniques), since the perceived benefits of “sensible” speed limits will offset objections to the increased enforcement. Alternatives 2 and 3 require legislative support.

Intensive measures required

with unrealistic speed limits that are universally ignored by motorists. In most areas of the US, the 55 mile per hour (mph) speed limit has, for all intents and purposes produced a nation of law-breakers. On many US roadways, it is common for close to 100 per cent of the vehicles to be exceeding the speed limit, a fact which calls into question the value of existing speed limit signage. There are three alternatives to the current situation: 1. Retain the 55 mph speed limits, and greatly increase enforcement such that speeders are assured of receiving a citation. Photo enforcement or other automated enforcement techniques are the only way in which an appropriate intensity of enforcement can be practically achieved. 2. Increase speed limits to a level that reflects actual highway speeds. Combine the increased speed limits with increased concentration of enforcement. Safety advocates are likely to (correctly) oppose this measure, since “actual highway speeds” are variable depending on time of day, weather conditions, roadway geometrics, percent of familiar drivers, vehicle mix (trucks vs. autos), etc. A higher speed that may be safe for one set of conditions could be unsafe under other conditions. However,unless the number of speed violators is significantly below 100 per cent (and probably below 10 per cent), manual enforcement techniques are impractical. 3. Take advantage of existing technology to implement a regulatory variable speed system in which speed limits are automatically displayed at the prevailing 85 percentile speeds, on the theory that the majority of drivers will automatically select the safe speed for prewww.h3bmedia.com

The common denominator of these three techniques is greatly increased enforcement, which must be accompanied by an intense public education program explaining the benefits of the selected approach. As demonstrated by the Victoria program, whichever alternative is selected, it must be accompanied by legislative policy support and adequate funding, to ensure its success. In this manner, the three Es of safety are employed. Any of these three alternatives is superior to the current sporadic enforcement of unrealistic speed limits. The public recognizes the consequences of drunk driving to a much greater extent than speed, and has supported increased penalties for those driving while intoxicated. This may be the result of the efforts of groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD), or it could be caused by the fact that a relatively small percentage of motorists drive under the influence, while “everyone speeds”. Whatever the reason, the penalties for driving under the influence (DUI) have been significantly increased during the past 20 years, with approximately 1,600 new DUI laws passed nationwide within the US since 1980. A few examples include the fact that “all States have adopted 21 as the legal drinking age, and two-thirds of the states have passed Administrative License Revocation (ALR) laws, which allow the arresting officer to take the license of drivers who fail or refuse to take a breath test. In addition, many states have lowered the legal BAC limit from 0.10 to 0.08 percent for adults, and more than a dozen states have passed Zero Tolerance laws which prohibit drivers under 21 from having any measurable amount of alcohol in their blood system.” But it is too early to declare victory. While these measures along with extensive public education are likely to be responsible for a nearly 5 per cent reduction in alcohol related fatalities, this slow progress is unacceptable in view of the fact that more than 14,000 individuals lost their lives in 2005 due to drunk driving. It is clear that additional steps must be taken, again to include increased enforcement, expanded public education, and additional funding. A list of measures that have proven effective is presented on DUI.com, a website supported by the State of California. A sample of the measures listed by this reference, over and above those that were previously mentioned includes: • Alcohol treatment programs • Server intervention and education programs • House arrest in lieu of jail • Lower BAC for repeat offenders Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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The Thinker Table 1. Rank of 10 Leading Causes of Global Burden of Disease*

Table 2. History of US Fatalities

1990 Rank/Disease

Fatal Crashes Total Fatalities

2000 Rank/Disease

1 Lower Respiratory Infections 2 Diarrheal diseases 3 Perinatal conditions 4 Unipolar major depression 5 Ischaemic heart disease

1 Ischaemic heart disease 2 Unipolar major depression 3 Road traffic injuries 4 Cerebrovascular disease 5 Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 6 Cerebrovascular disease 6 Lower Respiratory Infections 7 Tuberculosis 7 Tuberculosis 8 Measles 8 War 9 Road traffic injuries 9 Diarrheal diseases 10 Congenital abnormalities 10 HIV * Rankings measured in terms of Disability Adjusted Life Year (DALY), which is a measure that ombines information on the number of years lost from premature death with the loss of health from disability.

• Greatly increasing the number of sobriety check points (as per the Victoria program) • Expanded public information and education • Effective Vehicle-Based Countermeasures • Vehicle impoundment or immobilization • Ignition interlock. The referenced website indicates that measures being used which have not proven effective include jail or community service and fines, even though these approaches continue to be used. Ignition interlocks are of particular interest, since they have been shown to reduce repeat offenses by 50 per cent to 90 per cent. These devices operate by requiring the driver to breath into a device that determines the BAC level. If preset limits are exceeded, the vehicle will not start. Other forms of interlocks are on the horizon, including one in which the driver’s BAC is measured by steering wheel sensors. These devices, which represent the engineering“E”,combined with aggressive enforcement and increased education, offer the promise of significant reductions in alcohol related fatalities.

Traffic safety in the United States

The successes of the Australians and others, the availability of new technologies, an improved understanding of the highway safety problem and its cures, are all causes for optimism. The US, as a leader in technology, with a well funded safety research program should be a world leader in the field of highway safety. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. In 1998, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published a strategic plan in which it established the goals of a 20 per cent reduction in fatalities and a 20 per cent reduction in serious injuries within ten years (by 2008 – one year from now). As indicated in Table 2, the US is not only failing to meet these goals, but fatalities have con-

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2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

39,189 38,444 38,477 38,491 37,862 43,443 42,836 42,884 43,005 42,196

National Fatality Rates Fatalities per 100m Vehicle Miles Traveled 1.47

1.45

1.48

1.51

1.51

14.74

14.93

14.80

Fatalities per 100,000: Population 14.66

14.59

Fatalities per 100,000: Registered Vehicles -

18.00

18.59

19.06

19.07

tinued to increase since the plan was published. As indicated in the table, the fatality rate decreased between 2001 and 2004, but, with the exception of 2003 and 2004 the total number of fatalities consistently increased. The statistics for 2005 are particularly alarming, since both the number of fatalities and the fatality rate increased over those for 2004. This lack of progress reduces the FHWA strategic plan to little more than a publicity piece, since the results have so little relationship to the goals. During the eight years since the plan was announced, there has been little tracking of results, and almost no mid-course corrections to ensure that the goals are being met. Perhaps most important there has been little legislative support for the use of techniques that will ensure these goals are met. There is little point in strategic planning without assurance of the needed underlying support. Reference 2 indicates that to be effective, strategic plans must include the following characteristics: • “The traffic safety problems to be addressed should be the major problems and each should be tractable. • The action plan should include interventions for which there is adequate scientific evidence of likely effectiveness (or controlled trials of innovations of unknown effectiveness). • The implementing agencies should have transparent lines of accountability for effective implementation.” The FHWA strategic plan violates many of these guidelines, in that it makes no attempt to identify the root causes of roadway injuries and fatalities, and makes no connection between the strategies and the problem to be solved.

Cure or be cured

Speed and alcoholism are major highway safety problems. Yet there is demonstrated evidence that they are tractable. Many interventions with proven effectiveness exist, if only the United States and its counterparts throughout the world would adopt appropriate planning methodologies, and muster the political will for their implementation. Unless the obvious steps are taken, the auto safety pandemic will continue, with social consequences that dwarf the impacts of E. Coli bacteria on spinach, and for that matter, most major wars. TH Phil Tarnoff can be contacted via email at [email protected] www.h3bmedia.com

CARE, COMPASSION AND CONCERN ON THE FREEWAY

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Homeland Security

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

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Cover Story

Reports that suggest pollution caused by the transportation industry is one of the root causes of global warming may have overlooked something crucial, says AMY ZUCKERMAN.Thinking Highways presents the hottest traffic technology for beating global warming

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On 2 February 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its strongest-ever warning that human activity was to blame for climate change, or what is commonly called global warming. This same scientific body, comprised of the world’s top climate scientists, warned that the rise of global temperatures and extreme weather phenomena would increase unless greenhouse gas emissions were substantially reduced. It’s commonly known that carbon dioxide issued from burning coal and petroleum-fueled vehicles are key sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, organizations like World Watch predict the numbers of vehicles in use “will double in a mere 25 years” as countries like China start to outstrip even the United States in automobile use. Drill down a bit further and it’s not hard to connect vehicular emissions with global warming. Climate experts, working hand in hand with traffic management experts like John Collura, Director of the UMass Transportation Center and a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA have known for at least 40 years that emissions are highest when vehicles idle. “The United States is providing 45 per cent of the world’s automotive CO2 emissions, which reinforces the notion that we need to step up,” he said.

Idle talk

Cut down on idling, which occurs largely when there is traffic congestion, and it’s possible to reduce emission of greenhouse gases if not entirely eliminate global warming. In a recent study, the National Academy of Sciences found that the air quality benefit of a typical traffic signalization improvement was about US$20 per 1,000 tons of pollutants removed, which has made experts in Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Cover Story the United States, including Collura, convinced that traffic signal projects may be among the more environmentally cost-effective approaches to congestion mitigation that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In their 2005 Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute, authors David Schrank and Tim Lomax cited freeway incident management, freeway ramp metering, arterial street signal coordination and arterial street access management as key approaches to saving fuel. Once again, it’s well known that idling uses up more fuel and generates more emissions, than driving. Not that addressing idling is a panacea, but it is a priority in Michigan where the auto industry is under the gun to reduce vehicle emissions. Marsha Small, manager for the Michigan Department of Transportation (DOT) Statewide Planning Section in Lansing, MI warns that even if “we were to reduce vehicular emissions by 60 to 70 per cent we would still have an issue (with global warming). There’s enough carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and they’re not going away. However, we still need to look at more technologies across all our industries, and that’s beyond the automotive and trucking industries, if we’re going to achieve some kind of climate equilibrium.” With this knowledge in mind, and growing political concerns about global warning, the experts who specialize in traffic management are working hard to mitigate traffic snarls and gridlocks that consume work time, contribute to the release of greenhouse gases as cars and trucks idle in traffic, not to mention the waste of costly fuel. Here are a few examples of some of the newest approaches to keeping traffic flowing:

Street signal timing

Brad Winkler, a congestion management specialist with the Michigan DOT, considers simply updating current signal timing plans “one of the most efficient and costeffective ways of improving congestion.” The technology to “actuate” signals so they respond automatically to traffic flow has been around for five to 10 years. Also, select areas in Michigan and around the country are experimenting with attaching strobes to emergency vehicles so they can activate traffic signals to provide clear access during emergencies. Winkler says the Michigan signal actuation process, which is slowly being deployed statewide, works this way: sensors are implanted along busy arteries at key junctures such as cross street. The lights are set to remain green until “a real vehicle pulls up, at which point it starts the timing of a yellow light at the main street to allow the car to turn. This keeps traffic flowing maximally so vehicles are not sitting idling,” he said. Collura has recent experience working on traffic signal timing in Massachusetts, Burlington, VT and Alexandria and Arlington, VA. He says these projects have

shown “a 20 to 30 per cent improvement of efficiency along roadways when you re-time signals. One of the simplest steps you can take to improve traffic flow, which leads to many consequences, is to just improve the signal control systems and you don’t even need to replace the old ones – just re-time the signals to conform with the new traffic patterns that change every couple of years,” he says. Sounds simple, but in the US the money to address traffic signals hasn’t always been there. As Collura and Winkler point out, States struggling for cashflow have limited funds and staff for addressing traffic improvements.“We have a lot of national priorities and transport is just one,” said Collura, who estimated the cost of assessing key choke-points in a mid-size city would be US$200,000 to US$300,000. “What would follow would be major investments in signal technology, but the first step is to use the technology of today and make it efficient,” he says.

“There’s enough carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and they’re not going away”

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Traffic-seeking sensors

John Collins, former president of ITS America and now a vice president at Traffic.com in Pennsylvania spends his days tracking the technology that can be applied to traffic reporting with the aim of reducing congestion in metwww.h3bmedia.com

Cover Story tion with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is cooperating with the Federal Highway Administration in a federally funded project to create and maintain a Regional Traveler Information Center (RTIC) for that region. Called MassTraveler, the center is located in the UMass Transit Operations facility on campus and collects, analyzes, and disseminates traffic, public transportation and tourism information for use by state and local agencies, private entities, and the general public. And Collins reports that the automotive industry including Honda, Toyota and General Motors - is interested in real-time traffic information fed from XM satellite (a traffic system) wirelessly into their navigation systems, which now include GIS mapping capabilities. However, it’s the high-end models that will be tested first, such as Acura or Cadillac, he says.

Lane merging in connection with work zones

ropolitan areas nationwide. As of last spring, Collins said 19 markets in the Traffic.com system were gathering information through sensors embedded in roads. There were over 1,000 sensors already in use in markets such as Boston, MA, Providence, RI, Philadelphia, PA and many others. According to Collins, Traffic.com is testing special highway sensors in Boston that actually seek out traffic congestion and then transmit information into central database. From this data technicians are able to create video maps that are transmitted to subscribers and can be viewed on a number of platforms, including cell phones, according to Collins. Winkler reports that Traffic.com has been operating in Detroit for the last 18 months and now has 150 sensors embedded in streets. “They’re starting to use them to report real-time data of speed and vehicle placement in lanes,” he says.

Real-time traffic feed

A lot of States are experimenting with keeping traffic moving along highways and arterial roads with an array of real-time traffic image feeds to Websites or even directly into vehicle navigation systems. For example, the state of Arkansas has created near real-time video traffic feed of major interstates to a Website for motorists to monitor. The Massachusetts Highway Department, in conjuncwww.h3bmedia.com

Traffic commonly slows along highways during construction, which is a major cause of traffic congestion and idling. There are many different types of technology in field test that include various types of alarms to alert drivers as they approach highway work zones and give them an option of switching lanes and slowing at a rate that doesn’t impede traffic flow. These are coupled, in some places like Michigan, with lane merging technologies often utilizing LED electronic signage. Jeff Grossklaus, construction staff engineer with the Michigan DOT in Lansing, has worked on a number of lane-merging pilot schemes in conjunction with Wayne State University in Detroit. He conducted two pilots in “late lane mergers” that involved forcing cars to trade on and off entering one lane relatively close to the construction site rather than merging a mile or more out. This pilot worked best when there was high volume and there was plenty of press coverage to alert regular drivers of what to expect. The Michigan DOT has also started a microsimulation of corridors in the Detroit area to assess the impact of detours on traffic flow, adds Winkler.“The aim is to know which roads to shut down and which arterial routes to use,” he said.

GIS applications

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are being used in states like Michigan to provide truly accurate location data. According to Winkler, six state agencies built a State of Michigan GIS six years ago that includes “every road from the local to highway level, trails, rails, rivers, lakes all in one GIS platform that is available for free from government and is now used as a basis for all of our road projects.” GIS provides “us consistency because all of the models are based on the same data.We use the GIS platform to gives us the big picture on traffic now and where it will be in the future, so we can plan based on where we will need to improve. We have a much more realistic view of the world and much better model results because of the data available to us. To reduce idling, for example, we can map all construction zones and plot rerouting accurately and consistently statewide,” he says. th Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Homeland Security

The people or their sun?

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

Cover Story The question, “Why is there another global warming article in Thinking Highways?” was answered just as I finally started to put my thoughts onto paper. The radio reported on the UK’s “60 per cent by 2050” announcement and the news was not good on two fronts, except for those moved more by faith or photo opportunities than science. Not good, because that grandiose goal ignores both the economic benefits of improving productivity – for every member of our human society – and, with respect to the required/expected improvements in fuel efficiency, the iron ‘law of diminishing returns’, not to mention several past and recent scientific developments. Not good, because of the probability that the pursuit of such a false and unattainable goal will divert material and human resources, in the ITS community as elsewhere, into dead ends (e.g. CO2 payments to governments who have so abused both their citizens and their economy that their productivity is already in decline) at the same time as everyone’s standard of living declines in tempo with decreasing productivity.

Enough of the ‘why’, now for the ‘what’

When the Kyoto Accord and the working methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first came to my attention I was, pensioned off after 23 years as a technocrat with Environment Canada, initially very understanding, even sympathetic, at seeing the work of the climatologists severely misrepresented in summaries and sound bites prepared by the politicians. Later, when it appeared that at least some of my fellow scientists were pre-misrepresenting their work in order

In the second of our features looking at transportation’s role in our changing climate, AL GULLON , a specialist in the relationship between the automobile and the environment, wonders if anthropogenic global warming is actually only ‘political’ science www.h3bmedia.com

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Cover Story to remain ‘on the list’ for research contracts, sympathy turned to shame and I was looking for ways to disown my science degree. Fortunately I also have an engineering degree to fall back on. Whereas it is the scientist’s job to develop an understanding of what is theoretically possible, including speculating on scale-ups from proven laboratory results, it is the engineer’s job to calculate whether the laws of nature thus revealed can be economically combined to produce useful objects and/or processes which can be (safely) placed at the service of humans. This ‘division of labour’ works well in the private sector but is derailed when politicians arrive, few of whom are scientists and fewer engineers. In whichever country or issue they pay no attention to the engineers and, as in global warming, seem to extrapolate on the scientists’ speculations.

Honest to a fault?

It was in October 1999 that Prof. Dr. Dusan Gruden, now retired but then Porsche’s Director for Environment and Energy, responded to my invitation to bring their message on global warming to Ottawa. As I had heard his presentation at several international meetings, it’s actually a two-part message: firstly, “The combustion of petroleum products by the private automobile contributes an insignificant portion of the global CO2 emissions” and, secondly, “NEVERTHELESS, the automobile industry will continue its ongoing, and fruitful (an average of 1 per cent per year over the past 25 years), efforts to improve fuel consumption.” Unfortunately the emotional controversy surrounding the first part often obscures the second part of the message. The research behind the presentation [Emissions and Air Quality, Lenz and Cozzarini, SAE Publications (with 148 references!)] was carried out by Dr. Gruden’s alma mater, the Technical University of Vienna. Given the ‘facts’ we have been fed by the media, the first part is surprising, at least. Nevertheless it is easily understandable (even by those of us without Dr. Gruden’s academic qualifications) once you realize that true scientists are the most honest inhabitants of this planet. They won’t even let you misunderstand the accuracy of their calculations. They insist on providing what they call an ‘error band’ around the answer. (Unfortunately they can do little about the misquotes and misrepresentations of their work by the mass media – and by the small and large “p” politicians.)

urements’ are in fact of dubious accuracy so it could be as low as 600 or as high as a number slightly north of 1000.” “What about the automobile?” you say. And they say, “We have some better numbers for total man-made CO2. It’s somewhere close to 28. Say plus or minus 2. And we’ve got some real good numbers for the personal automobile itself. All you have to know really is the amount of gasoline (of each formulation) sold each year and, because it is everywhere subject to taxes, every government keeps a good count. What? Oh, yes. The number is 1.54 ... roughly. Plus or minus 0.075.” We can now put the automobile’s role in CO2 emissions in perspective.We will ignore that huge error band (600 to 1000+) for a moment and just focus on the ‘best guess’ 770 for natural emissions to which we will add the maximum amount of manmade (28+2) to get a round number 800 for total global annual emissions of CO2. Within that best-guess total of 800 Gigatonnes/year our automobiles contribute just 1.54. (For the mathematically minded that’s two tenths of 1 per cent.) Somehow the word “insignificant” comes to mind.

0.6 degrees of separation

So, is CO2 even the major driver for the purported Greenhouse Effect? Intrigued by that Porsche presentation I then did some surfing on the Internet for the base IPCC data behind their contention that anthropogenic CO2 was the major driver of the greenhouse effect. I quickly discovered that all the fuss was over a purported warming of just 0.6ºC … over the past century! My first thought was that it was technically impossible to take the earth’s temperature with such precision. However, the next steps proved me wrong on that point. A little more surfing revealed that some scientists were suggesting that small, cyclical variations in the radiation of the sun might be at the root of the observed warming trend. When I put the temperature trendline on a graph with that Solar Cycle (Figure 1) I soon noticed that the small perturbations along the length of the temperature trendline corresponded very well with the Solar Maximums. Whatever might be moving that temperature trendline it was now certain that the technicians manning the weather stations throughout the world were doing an excellent job. An email exchange with the IPCC administration directed me to a downloadable source of the corresponding, century long, trendline for anthropogenic emissions of CO2.When added to Figure 1 it produced a gigantic X through the theory that CO2 was moving the earth’s temperature. The CO2 line rises strongly and steadily right through the mid-century, three decade long decline in the temperature line. Note that this does not disprove the greenhouse effect. CO2 is a minor greenhouse agent, with both water vapour and methane being much stronger. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that either of those took that

“It is the engineer’s job to see if the laws of nature can be economically combined to produce useful objects”

Being precise about imprecision

You ask for the answer to the ‘burning question of the day’ (pun intended) and they don’t give you one answer, they give you three! Translated into everyday English it comes out something like, “Well, using currently published research on presently known emission sources, our best guess at the CO2 emissions from natural sources is 770 Gigatonnes per year. However, many of the ‘meas-

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www.h3bmedia.com

Cover Story three-decade long drop in mid-century. So, if not a greenhouse effect, then what is causing the indisputable rise in global temperature? Before leaving Figure 1 for Figure 2 you should note two things about the Solar Irradiance line. Firstly it does show that mid-century decline. Of almost equal importance it carries the adjective ‘reconstructed’. Although no regular measurements of solar irradiation had been made until 1979, irregular measurements could be correlated with sunspots which have been regularly recorded since the early 1600s. In this way scientists

could ‘reconstruct’ the probable annual irradiance levels shown in Figure 1.

A completely credible correlation However, since 1979 satellite measurements have been made of the intensity of the sunlight reaching the top of our atmosphere and regular measurements have been made of CO2 levels near the surface of the earth and oceans. Those measurements and the magic of the Internet have enabled the construction of Figure 2 which both extends Figure 1 into this century and provides a more accurate and detailed look at the past 25 years. The three block-arrows point to the three maxima marking off two Solar Cycles. The first covers the 1980’s and is the standard length of 11 years. The second, however, is only 9-10 years which leads to a higher minimum and thus a higher average annual energy inflow than in the 1980s. This correlates well with the global temperature line over those two decades When first assembled the correlation between the temperature line and the, rather irregular, solar radiation line was poor (R=0.2). However, while researching on the ‘net I was reminded that volcanoes can have a lengthy impact on global tempera-

1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

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Cover Story

“What the environmentalists are forgetting is that engineers are the original conservationists” tures and so explored both them and El Ninos. As you can see at the bottom of Figure 2 it was a Eureka moment. Actually several moments, because each of these extreme events locked into one of the aforementioned irregularities, until finally all of them were covered.They are colour-coded so that blue indicates an event which pulls the temperature down in their year(s) of operation and red indicates one which tends to raise global temperatures. By mentally moving the temperature line back to where it would have been without each event one can clearly see that the global temperature line has a great visual correspondence with the solar irradiance line. Although it was not done accurately enough to include in this article I did succumb to the temptation of nudging the numbers in the indicated direction in my Excel spread sheet and then ran the correlation again … and the R jumped to 0.6!

The Wrapup

Now all this is most definitely NOT to say that we should do nothing about the energy consumption of the automobile or more generally the energy consumptive nature of today’s human society. What the environmentalists are forgetting is that engineers, including auto-

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motive engineers, are the original conservationists. As a personal example, I shudder every time I see a two tonne SUV with only the driver on board. That, however, is a judgement on consumer choice. The engine in that SUV has a very good efficiency (measured as BSFC) and most SUVs employ very sophisticated controls to deliver emission performance much better than the government requires. The problem is that most SUVs have way too much weight for the load they are carrying. I shudder because they are mostly used inefficiently. We must stop whipping the willing horse. Aided by informed consumers automobile engineers will continue progress on improving both engine efficiency and overall vehicle efficiency. In that manner we will usually find that, instead of paying an exorbitant price for minuscule reductions,we will find that environmental improvements will actually save us money. TH For more information about Al Gullon and his findings, go to: www.alsaces.ca For more information about anthropogenic global warming please visit: www.john-daly.com/bull120.htm www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls www.h3bmedia.com

Roads Scholar

Highways are getting smarter. They look the same,

With IRD technology, our roads can monitor, record and

black asphalt and white lines but look a little closer.

communicate thousands of pieces of data every second

Small weigh and speed detectors right in the asphalt,

over wired and wireless networks. Data that you can use

overhead cameras and sensors to

to make roads stronger, faster, and safer.

record every move. Other more obvious

Talk to the smart people at IRD,

additions are there too, like message

they’ve been leading the way in ITS

signs that change for every vehicle!

for over 25 years.

ir dinc.com

Biometrics

Potentially

explosive

Lack of biometric clearance for truckers is potentially putting North American ports, roads and population centers at risk, as AMY ZUCKERMAN reports

Lack of a standardized biometric databases, interoperable equipment, not to mention politics and a ninth-hour debate on encryption processes between the ports and biometric industry groups, has stalled deployment of the long-awaited Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) cards for truckers entering and exiting the nation’s ports, leaving the nation’s ports, roadways and population centers vulnerable to terrorist or other attacks. The hold on issuing TWIC cards after five years of development means that thousands of truckers – sometimes as many as 5,000 in one day – are not being cleared in a fashion that would electronically connect their fingerprints with a swipe of an identification card to lists of known or suspected terrorists or criminals. It also means longer waits for clearance at the ports when a trucker or load is suspect as happened on 7 January in Miami, FL. when two Iraqis and a Lebanese carrying electronic auto parts were stopped and searched. The media later reported that this was a false alarm. On 28 February a federally chartered maritime advi-

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sory board failed to identify a technology for the TWIC cards that would satisfy all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and maritime industry requirements. The debate centred largely around encryption, which protects the contents of the cards from hackers or other outside sources. Despite lack of consensus on the TWIC technology, DHS reportedly awarded a US$70m contract in January to Lockheed Martin Corp. to begin enrolling maritime workers and issuing the TWIC cards, according to news reports. For the last 20 years, experts have touted biometrics as a method to safeguard the trucking industry from theft, fraud and, more recently, terrorism, yet today only a handful of States are using biometric technology in commercial drivers’ licenses (CDL), let alone at the nation’s ports. Biometrics involves the use of human characteristics such as fingerprints, irises or facial scans to identify an individual. When embedded in a computer chip, individual human characteristics can be embedded in an ID card as part of credentialing or for security processes. www.h3bmedia.com

Biometrics The Transportation Safety Administration’s (TSA) public relations officials point to successful tests of the biometric ID elements of the TWIC card in at least one location - the state of Florida - where Billy Dickson, a retired lieutenant colonel with the Florida State Highway Police, says his department conducted a “shortterm test on the TWIC card a year ago at the Port of Canaveral and Port of Pensacola.” Dickson is now a senior management analyst with the Florida Department of Highway Safety. “We proved to ourselves that the biometric piece worked,” said Dickson, explaining they set up enrollment centers at the ports using a General Electricdesigned chip based on driver’s fingerprints. Acknowledging initial bugs – not to mention the fact that two to four percent of the population (including truckers) didn’t have what he calls “usable fingerprints” – Dickson says the cards are about to go “operational” in Panama City and Fernandina Beach, FL, north of Jacksonville. Dickson has no numbers on truckers involved, but believes there is “a significant amount because Fernandina has big truck movement.” At Panama City, the 400 people issued TWIC cards with the GE technology for biometric IDs included seaport workers and truckers, with no breakout on truckers, says Dickson. They’re also looking at facial recognition and iris scans as “suitable alternatives” to fingerprints for any one coming and going from Florida ports.

Time sensitive

“There have been successful tests of the biometric ID elements of the TWIC card in at least one location”

Lisa Himber, vice president of the Maritime Exchange in Philadelphia, PA, and co-chairman of the maritime committee’s TWIC working group, paints a less positive picture of the TWIC program. At the 28 February meeting Himber reportedly peppered the committee with questions about how encryption would actually work in the field and noted that DHS only gave her committee a month to address encryption issues before that session. In interviews in late fall of 2006, Himber was equally concerned about the fact that although TWIC enrollment readers were installed as early as August 2002 for pilot programs at Delaware River, DE, Long Beach, CA and a number of Florida ports - pilots completed in June 2005 –the readers weren’t yet activated to identify truckers coming and going from port facilities. And this despite the fact that each site had to laboriously enroll truckers and take their fingerprints to be embedded in the card, she said, adding that although all pilot sites tested the magnetic strip and smart chip portions of the IDs, “testing of the biometric part of the card wasn’t completed at all or at any port facilities.” Himber had no knowledge of Dickson’s claims for Florida. She said her office did test the biometric ID features, but not at port facilities in her jurisdiction. Himber said they arranged a test as a means of entering their computer room and the technology worked under those www.h3bmedia.com

conditions, though as not verified in the field. She doesn’t know what’s happened to the biometricembedded TWIC cards issued to close to 3,000 truckers who enrolled in the TWIC program pilot site in Delaware. As for why the biometrics weren’t tested, Himber says “only TSA can say. ‘We expected it would be, but why we don’t know’. The biometrics wasn’t tested sufficiently for the pilots, but the TSA is saying that biometrics were successfully tested.” Greg Owen supports the concept behind TWIC, which he says emerged as part of the Graham/Hollings legislation introduced two years before 9/11 to curb theft at the nation’s ports. CEO and Head Coach of Tri-Modal Transportation Services, Carson, CA, and an active member of American Trucking Association (ATA), Owens is so security conscious that he offered his facility as a TWIC ID card test site for the Port of Long Beach/ San Pedro this year. “The problem was we never got to test the product live,” said Owen, offering no explanation. “There were the normal startup problems with computers, applications, pre-process, initial card and final card problems, along with the separation of drivers for Hazmat and TWIC, but everyone (agencies involved) was protecting their turf. I’d wanted one card -- in our case, the commercial drivers license - working for all three purposes - the State driver’s license, Hazmat and TWIC for security.” He believes the “biggest stumbling block behind TWIC is organized labor. They just don’t want it. The idea of a good background check threatens their livelihood. Personally I hope we get the chance to be a model for industry. I believe TWIC has merit and needs to move forward,” he said. Then there’s the lack of a federally mandated standard for a biometric ID card so no one card operates across all security or risk-related programs -- whether at seaports, airports and border crossings – and for CDLs. A national standard for TSA scanning equipment exists, but not for biometric technologies that relate to trucking industry security, says Dominique Harrington, deputy director of testing services for the National Biometric Security Project. She agrees that without a national standard vendors are free to manufacture to whatever standard they believe works best for the marketplace, and biometric ID technology manufactured by one vendor may not work with technology made by another. “If the trucking world wants a national standard for biometrics technology to be used in trucking they need to attend the M1 ANSI Insights Committee for Biometrics,” she said. M1 is a private industry standards committee hosted by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) based in Washington, D.C.

The business of biometrics

From the perspective of fleet owners like Philip Byrd, the lack of standardization has become a mish-mash that could result in truck drivers carrying large numThinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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bers of biometric IDs to enter various facilities. Owner of Bulldog Hiway Express, a regional full truckload carrier based in North Charleston, SC, Byrd spoke on behalf of the ATA at the 10 Ocober 2006 US House Small Business Committee hearings on the TWIC ID card, which is supposed to utilize biometrics for trucker clearance at the nation’s ports. Byrd echoed the committee chair’s assertions that the government’s TWIC security process for port workers was too cumbersome and costly for America’s small businesses and needs to be revamped and strengthened to be effective. According to a report posted on the ATA Web site, Byrd advised the committee that the TWIC rules, as proposed, place a significant burden on commerce and small intermodal trucking companies without commensurate security benefits. He particularly identified the costly, inefficient and duplicative nature of the pending credentialing proposal and its failure to preempt state and local background checks and access requirements that would unduly burden truckers entering individual port facilities around the country, according to this report. Reached after his Washington, DC appearance, Byrd emphasized that he had no problem with TWIC “in concept,” but complained about the lack of a national standard to create one technology that would translate into one biometric-based ID for multiple purposes from entering ports to airports and border crossings – all governed by different government agencies and or security and/or supply chain related programs. Regarding TWIC, Byrd said “every port is doing its own thing when we should have the same process for TWIC as hazmat,” or border crossings. Without a national standard for biometric technology, he said drivers would have to carry “15 to 20 plastic cards. How do you carry all that around and how does a driver keep up?” he asked. According to Byrd,“There should be a system in place across America where one universal card screens drivers properly so commerce takes place uninterrupted and at the same time secures our gates and borders. The trucking industry wants a good, thorough system and doesn’t want to go through this process of being credentialed for biometric IDs more than once.”

One screening process should suffice, and that is why we support the concept of the TWIC. But the way it is being implemented now, the TWIC is simply an additional screening process, with a high cost, that is not universal in nature as it was originally intended. TSA has stated that it intends to make the TWIC a single process for all screenings, but we need to get to implementing it as such.” Despite their concerns, most interviewed for this article are true believers in biometrics as a concept and want to see biometric technologies embedded in one universal ID card to thwart theft and terrorism. “I think biometrics is still a phenomenal opportunity and a sound concept, but we seem to have a difficult time moving from concept to operational reality,” said Dan Murray, vice president of research for the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), based in the St. Paul, MN office. “I think unfortunately there’s a range of issues (in this field) from policy and programs to technology applications and interoperability.” Although he calls the technology feasible, that doesn’t make it easy to apply. With TWIC, for example, he says “when you move quickly to various environments and go to interoperability - trying to apply TWIC to provide facility access, whether that’s getting into my own back gate, port or airport, that’s when we seem to be running into a brick wall.”

“Truck drivers have raised safety concerns about gamma ray technology”

Multiple programs

Martin Rojas, Executive director of Safety Security of Operations, ATA echoes Byrd’s concern about the rise of multiple programs utilizing biometrics that will require drivers to carry multiple cards because the technology may not be interoperable – meaning functional from one system or program to another. While supporting the use of background checks for drivers, he says that these be based on risk. “Each screening represents a separate cost and process, and some drivers that operate at ports, transport hazardous materials or move C-TPAT cargo across the border undergo three separate, yet equal, screenings.

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Slow going

TWIC isn’t the only place where application of biometrics are lagging in the effort to ID truckers . The application of biometrics for commercial drivers’ licenses (CDLs) is taking place in a smattering of States, but reportedly has been slowed by a number of factors. One problem in applying biometrics for CDLs is the fact that the FBI’s enormous fingerprint database can’t be tapped for civilian use, says Michael Yura, senior vice president for the West Virginia Operations for the Washington, DCbased National Biometric Security Project. This slows access of information and means that various federal agencies, along with the states, have to collect their own fingerprints – none of which can communicate with the FBI’s database, he said.. Despite bureaucratic nightmares,‘cranky’ technology and what appears to be general confusion, biometric systems are being tested in the field under the auspices of a number of state initiatives. Since the 1990s, use of biometrics in CDLs has grown to include the states of Illinois, Georgia, Oklahoma, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Texas, Massachusetts, Oregon, Kansas and Alabama, and possibly a handful of others, though information on exactly what states are utilizing biometrics was not available from federal agencies or associations like the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) in Alexandria, VA. Information on state-wide efforts to utilize either digitized fingerprints or facial features came largely from press releases from vendors such as Digimarc Corp. in Beaverton, OR, which flatly declined to comment for this www.h3bmedia.com

Biometrics article. Digimarc is reportedly working with the Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles Services (DMV) to apply facial recognition technology to CDLs. The company also announced this summer it had a contract to work with the Massachusetts DMV and state police applying facial recognition technology to state CDLs. SAGEM Morpho, Inc. of Tacoma, WA. has been working with Viisage, a Nashville,Tenn. provider of advanced technology solutions to provide finger imaging in CDLs in Oklahoma. And Viisage’s IBT Division, which manufactures biometric-related technologies, reported in July that it had signed a contract with the state of Illinois to develop the biometrics for the state’s commercial driver’s licenses. According to Viisage officials, they were planning to “extend hazardous fingerprinting capabilities both for the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) Commercial HazMat Drivers” with the aim of eventually providing biometric-based driver’s licenses to the state’s estimated 465,000 commercial drivers.

Get REAL

The national effort to embed security technology in driver’s licenses is called REAL ID. Jason King, vice president of public relations and information services of AAMVA says no specific technology has been mandated at this time for REAL ID. “AAMVA has not seen sufficient evidence that any one biometric or combination of biometrics could satisfy the requirement for interstate usage. But several states have had success with biometrics on a single jurisdiction basis, mostly with facial recognition. Bottom line: biometrics have proven useful as a tool for DMVs, but AAMVA is not yet convinced that we could use them at an interstate level,” King said. Elaine Dezenski, senior vice president for global movement at Cross Match Technologies in Arlington, VA, - developer of ID management solutions for the federal government and commercial sector - explains that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “is trying to get their hands around what the regulations should look like for a driver’s license standard. There are lots of issues, including what card looks like, what technology to put in it - swiping or magnetic - and whether to go biometric or not,” she said. Although agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are working on ensuring that terrorists don’t infiltrate the trucking industry, and are obtaining fingerprints on hazmat drivers, Dezenski says she doesn’t think the fingerprints are yet embedded in an ID card that can be read electronically. “This is a huge subject,” Dezenski said of hazmat. “It’s kind of the litmus test to see how things would be rolled out and made accessible to a large population of workers spread out throughout the country.” There are also roadblocks to utilizing a CDL with embedded biometrics for security clearances. ATRIs’ Murray cites layers of jurisdiction over security matters

“without a central blue print” as a stumbling block in developing biometric IDs that would include CDLs. “Even within TSA, multiple systems and vendors are contracted to develop unique pieces of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) ID for ports, for example. Some of the most basic questions -that should have been answered early in the architecture design -- are still unanswered,” he said. As a result, he says an airline pilot’s TWIC card wouldn’t work at the Port of LA/Long Beach.“Maybe that’s OK, but what about a truck driver that serves both the Port and LAX airport?”

We need to talk

For those who argue that industry standards for biometrics exist and should suffice, Murray says “that’s patently incorrect.” He says the biometric algorithms used by each vendor “are different enough – which is what gives them their unique selling proposition - that the various systems proposed today will not talk to each other. Applying the smart card ‘GSA standard’ and saying the TWIC card is standardized and interoperable is patently incorrect. It would be very simple to take a West Coast port card, walk over to an East Coast port and see if the gate opens. Why hasn’t anyone done that yet?” According to James L Wayman, director, US National Biometric Test Center, College of Engineering at San Jose State University, and one of the country’s leading experts on biometrics, says “some States claim to be using biometrics, but the claims are dicey. California admits that their 22-year old system isn’t really being used: fingerprints are collected as required by law, but not used. There is a new RFP out from the California DMV proposing to use both facial recognition and fingerprinting for all DLs. Wayman adds that the following states require fingerprinting for all driver’s licenses, including CDLs: California, Texas, Georgia, Hawaii and Colorado. Colorado and Illinois claim to be using facial recognition for all driver’s licenses. Michigan and Delaware have outlawed the use of biometrics with driver’s licenses, he says, adding that “the problem with all of these projects is that there have been no audits of any of these systems except for California, which isn’t being used except for the collection of prints.” Officials at the California DMV could not comment, saying they were in the “procurement process.”

“Despite bureaucratic nightmares biometric systems for CDLs are being field tested”

www.h3bmedia.com

Revolution on the cards?

The REAL ID Act, signed into law in 2005 to address driver’s licenses, “does not mention biometrics. It gives the DOT (or maybe the Department of Homeland Security) the power to set requirements. Those requirements have not yet been set, but will certainly not include biometrics. As you know, the States are upset with the ‘unfunded mandate’ nature of the REAL ID Act to begin with. They may revolt anyway, with or without a biometrics requirement,” Wayman added. TH Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Thinking Differently

GNSS goes to school photo www.dandonovan.co.uk

Bern Grush, Founder Skymeter Corporation www.skymetercorp.com

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THIN KING HIG HW AYS

Why is there as much disagreement about satellite-based tolling in the form of vehicle positioning systems as there is discussion? Are we going to do this thing or not? Whenever we approach the cusp of a major technological change various schools of thought heat up to modulate that change. These may offer exciting predictions or defend the status quo. New solutions get oversimplified and change management is made to appear insurmountable. We are at such a point now in the approaching shift from established dedicated short range communications (DSRC), to the much vaunted, but still pending, vehicle positioning systems (VPS) that use global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), mapping, and wireless as the core metering technologies. On paper, this all looks straightforward. But besides the sheer scope of deployment complexity, with its social and political concerns, there remains the unsettling issue of evidentiary documentation for non-refutability and its associated accuracy issues. photo www.dandonovan.co.uk

DSRC’s microwave-based electronic toll collection is already very accurate and is still evolving. GNSS suffers from a nasty problem called multipath which means that signals from the satellite are so disturbed by terrain and tall buildings that it is very difficult to qualify an accurate position estimate in our cities. It is always like this when a new technology or new use for an existing technology is offered – it’s never quite “good enough”. It is certainly not as good as what we’ve already got.

photo www.dandonovan.co.uk

Thinking Differently

Signals from the satellite are so disturbed by terrain and tall buildings that it is very difficult to qualify an accurate position estimate in our cities.

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But GNSS works in Germany, doesn’t it? It does. But the degree of supporting technology and the relatively easier open-sky application, compared to, say, using that same system in New York or Shanghai, means it’s not yet ready for our fuller purpose – tolling any vehicle anywhere.

Well, doesn’t Galileo solve that? Not necessarily. Galileo will be better than GPS, but not enough on its own to solve the problem of evidentiary documentation for tolling. The promised Galileo accuracy of 1m, while an improvement over the comparable 3m from premodernized GPS, is an open-sky metric. Galileo will still be subject to multipath – especially the non-line-of-sight variety which is highly resistant to existing digital signal processing techniques. So on one hand we have DSRC that works well but is inflexible and has poor extensibility properties and on the other hand we have VPS that does not yet work reliably but is much more flexible and extensible – a perfect circumstance, by the way, for a classic Clayton Christensen “disruptive innovation”.

photo www.dandonovan.co.uk

The current landscape of opinion regarding VPS – especially with its use of GNSS data – is varied and fluid. To explore its range, I categorize recent opinion into a number of illustrative schools of thought for rhetorical purposes.

Thinking Differently

The “GNSS Is Necessary” School Government think-tanks and academic policy researchers are the major proponents of this thinking – perhaps more so in the EU but also to a growing degree in Asia, North America and elsewhere. The coalescing wisdom is that while having the potential to source highway financing, tolling major arteries with DSRC is insufficient to stem congestion for long. As well, access to central business districts needs congestion control and that in order to sharpen pricing signals it is better to remove or reduce fuel taxes and shift taxation to road use shaped by the real-time or static congestion context. Nowhere is this thinking more pronounced than in EU countries such as The Netherlands and the UK. DSRC’s infrastructure expense and impracticality, means it cannot be pervasive; hence we must keep fuel taxes in place attenuating the pricing signals we need to defeat congestion. If we reflect for a moment on the well documented reasons for the failure of predict and provide to manage congestion (“build it and they will it fill up”) we can see how a similar fate will befall “build and toll” or “HOV to HOT switchovers”. Since these approaches intentionally leave unpriced alternatives, they tend to sort those willing to pay from those less willing, and will continue to have a less-than-hoped-for impact on modality switch rates. Worse, the tolled facilities will fill up, and as both greenfield and switchover opportunities become increasingly rare, we will generate a massive patchwork of infrastructure-heavy, congested toll roads and a thriving navigation industry routing a portion of us away from them, leaving a growing number of pockets of congestion continuing to choke our cities and interurban routes.

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In illustration of this effect, a report from Trafficmaster, dated October 2005 ran: “With a price increase on the old M6 Toll road in August 2005, Trafficmaster has seen 7% month on month rise in the number of traffic delays using the old M6 between junctions 4 and 12. This section of the motorway then reached a dramatic 75% increase in congestion in October compared to the same time in 2004.” This is not to suggest that these approaches should not be considered in the short run, rather that they will eventually appear as mere band-aids in the history of congestion management just as predict and provide now appears to our 20/20 hindsight. A permanent control lever on congestion requires pricing signals. If you want to replace the fuel tax in a country, state or province, then to be fair you need to toll everywhere. Only low-infrastructure, GNSSbased VPS makes sense.

The “GNSS Is Unnecessary” School

The “GNSS Is Unnecessary” School

The “GNSS Is Easy” School

Many in this school are saying “DSRC works so don’t fix it”. Truth is DSRC for tolling is mature and highly reliable. There are numerous suppliers and millions of users who are familiar with it.

Some of us who have a passing familiarity with GPS fact and Galileo promise assume that this is a technical no-brainer – i.e. rollout may be painful, but “hey, geo-positioning is solved, right?”

But this school is also populated by a significant minority with vested interests or sunk investments in the EU and elsewhere and by many in the US where HOT systems are proposed much more often than area or cordon style congestion pricing systems, where experience with GNSS tolling is minimal, and where the infatuation with Galileo is barely noticeable compared to Europe.

Recently, a major international engineering firm suggested in expert written testimony to the UK Parliament (RP 53, February 2005) that since the devices we use for automotive navigation are proven and pervasive, the extension of their adequacy to tolling is evident. This line of argument ignores the critical necessity of evidentiary documentation that any tolling authority must rely on to ensure that tolls are metered and bills are generated in a non-refutable manner.

When dealing with heavy commercial vehicles, or when a limited access roadway is the target then DSRC is not only the current gold-standard, it is often the only reasonable way to go. At root, this school is endemic of localthinking that leaves the more challenging and larger view unexamined. And, besides, if VPS is going to take 5 more years, what choice do we have for the next 2 or 3 years, anyway?

The “GNSS Is Easy” School

The fact is that GPS has provided, and soon Galileo will provide, extraordinary positioning and navigation capabilities. But the demands of tolling systems are different from that of navigation. Automotive navigation tolerates momentary errors of several tens of meters, since human users readily cope by adding human intelligence. There is no correlate for that in a tolling system. An onboard unit (OBU) for tolling while much less expensive than a navigation system must reliably generate accurate and consistent bills based on time, place and distance. Occasional, nontrivial errors will not be welcomed. To this point, Transport for London (TfL) has just completed a study of 17 OBUs and in the conclusion to their online report wrote that average billing errors for all vendor systems ranged from 6.7% to 11.8% and that average journey length errors ranged from 5.4% to 10.5% depending on whether a vendor used their own or the trial’s mapping and billing routines as reference. Obviously, TfL is not a member of the GNSS Is Easy School, and we can safely assume membership is in decline.

Thinking Differently

The “GNSS Can’t Work” The “GNSS Can’t Work” School School

The “GNSS is Hard but Doable” School

As we become more familiar with the use of positioning systems for tolling, a new subset of us are saying this is far more difficult than we thought. In fact, this second group includes some so pessimistic that they think it cannot be done the way TDM people wish it could be done – certainly not in the foreseeable future.

This school is showing the most vigorous membership growth. Part of this is from the evidence of incremental improvement, part from the growing certainty that the Galileo fleet will orbit, and part is from the boost to signal availability given by high-sensitivity receivers now offered by several chip vendors.

GNSS for tolling is not mature. While there are already a number of suppliers of GNSS tolling technology, none are yet adequate to operate reliably in our urban landscapes. The realization that we’ll need integrated GPS and Galileo receivers is only two or three years old. The GPS+Galileo system is not even deployed yet.

To the latter point, a recent test made in London questioned how many satellites might be visible to a dual (GPS + Galileo) receiver as it drove a few miles along builtup streets in London. The results showed some areas that “saw” from zero to two GPS satellites, would now see from one to four satellites from the combined GPS+Galileo fleet. While clearly an improvement, this is still insufficiently redundant to develop any measure of positioning reliability. Clearly, this particular test neglected the signal reception improvements offered by high-sensitivity GNSS receivers. Given that combined GPS-Galileo fleet might put 14 to 17 vehicles above the London ground horizon, a high-sensitivity receiver would collect, at a guess, eight to 12 signals, rather than one to four. While the additional signals will certainly be badly disturbed by the architectural environment, the redundancy provides a handle to work with. Therein lays the opportunity.

There are only 500,000 motorists familiar with GNSS toiling devices and except for a handful from a couple of pilots in the EU and another notable one in Puget Sound and they are all operating heavy rigs in Germany. Since progress is being made, membership in the GNSS Can’t Work School is also declining. Some evidence again can be gleaned from the October 2006 TfL report on its GNSS trials. Not only did 14 firms think it worth their effort to trial, but TfL reported “a significant improvement on previous trials in 2004/2005”.

The “GNSS is Hard but Doable” School

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But the single greatest driver for the GNSS Is Hard but Doable School is simple business. As congestion grows, the GNSS is Necessary School grows in tandem and the demand will clearly be big enough to drive the necessary investment for solution.

photo www.dandonovan.co.uk

A recent test made in London questioned how many satellites might be visible to a dual (GPS + Galileo) receiver as it drove a few miles along built-up streets in London.

Thinking Differently

Government policy researchers and industry innovators will continue their drift toward “GNSS is necessary and doable”.

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And the Winners Are… As 2007 dawned DSRC is still superior. In the short run, the easiest way to fix the gas tax erosion problem is to put in as much DSRC tolling as possible and redistribute the revenue where needed. Unfortunately, such a demand-switching system will remain expensive every time you extend or reconfigure it. And, worse, it won’t end congestion. The best way to solve the gas-tax problem and congestion is to put a leak-proof demand-control system in place. That system is flexible and extendible GNSS-tolling. To do anything less is just a finger in the dyke. Government policy researchers and industry innovators will continue their drift toward “GNSS is necessary and doable”. What is missing in all this is that governments and industry are not doing enough to educate either motorists or mass media of the advantages to all parties of solving the scourge of congestion. As long as an informed debate stays only among government policy researchers and innovators, motorist hostility will continue to inform the political agenda.

Team talk

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

What are cooperative vehicle-infrastructure sytems? What can they do? What can’t they do? Is this Europe’s version of the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration program? All of these questions are answered by PAUL KOMPFNER and ZELJKO JEFTIC ... who ask a good few of their own for good measure This year it appears to be the fashion to talk about “cooperative systems,” “the always connected car” or vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. There seems to be universal agreement that the future of telematics will be the car that communicates. Indeed, the European Union is putting over €50m of R&D money into a group of large-scale projects that are intended to establish Europe as the global technology leader in this domain. Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating – in this case in what proportion of the roadside infrastructure will be equipped to communicate with cars, and likewise how many new cars and other vehicles will roll off the production line with a series-fit embedded communication system. This article, by the management team of the EU “CVIS” (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems) project, takes a sideways glance at cooperative systems, and asks some probing questions about what they are, how

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they might work in practice, who needs to play a part in their operation and what “deployment” means for cooperative systems. Let’s begin with a visit to the future…

A day in the life of cooperative systems…

What will tomorrow’s world look like once drivers, pedestrians, vehicles, portable devices, roadside infrastructure and centres can talk to each other? Let’s follow Stephanie on her trip to work and see how the paradigm of driving has changed for her now she can benefit from a wide range of cooperative mobility services. It’s 7.35am on 17 March 2014, and Stephanie is woken by the alarm on her cooperative mobile phone. The phone knows her agenda for today, and has just been alerted that there’s been an accident on her preferred route to work, with an expected delay of 10 minutes. The alarm wakes her up earlier than usual and tells her she’ll need to take a detour. After a shower and breakfast she www.h3bmedia.com

CVIS wave” of synchronised green lights all along its route to the scene of the fire. The cooperative emergency management system even sends new route advice messages to the other traffic, diverting drivers away from the incident area. Stephanie follows the updated advice and turns off her usual route for a few blocks, until she’s passed the fire scene and can rejoin the main road. Nearing the end of her journey, Stephanie gets a message from the vehicle behind her. It happens to be her neighbour Julie, saying hello and asking if she has time for a coffee – she accepts, as her trip was turning out to be quicker than expected. After a short break, when her car dispatches a few quick mails she dictated earlier for her office colleagues and clients, Stephanie is guided to the parking space reserved for her today, and arrives at the office. All along the journey, Stephanie’s car has been connected to the roadside data monitoring service and has downloaded data on its position, speed and heading, and extra information about the trip coming from the car’s sensors. The cooperative monitoring centre has processed this data with that from the thousands of other vehicles on the road, and has used the real-time traffic data to provide routeing recommendations to its service customers. Stephanie’s entire journey was safer, faster, cheaper and “greener” thanks to the new cooperative systems.

So what are “Cooperative Systems”?

gets into her cooperative vehicle and leaves for the office. Throughout her journey the vehicle screen displays a speed recommendation transmitted from the cooperative traffic system, as well as the status of the approaching traffic signals. She knows from experience that if she keeps to the suggested 65 km/h speed she can pass through the next few intersections without being stopped by a red light. At the same time, she might earn extra “green points” as a cooperative driver, credits that she could cash in later for access to environmental controlled zones, or to the right to use city-centre bus lanes whenever there is spare capacity. Further along her trip she stops before a traffic light that’s blinking red, which is accompanied by an alarm and a message on the display saying an emergency vehicle is approaching. A few seconds later a fire engine races across the intersection from her left, riding a “blue www.h3bmedia.com

Before they can cooperate, systems must first of all give, take and share information with each other. While systems individually may hold vast amounts of information, stored in the vehicle, in roadside equipment, in control and management centres and in mobile devices, these are usually organised vertically, with one organisation running the entire chain from data collection and processing to data delivery. If this information can be shared with other, cooperative services and applications, then all members of the cooperative mobility community - driver, passenger, traffic operator, emergency agency, fleet manager, pedestrian, etc - can benefit from it, and real synergy can occur. Beyond information sharing, systems can cooperate in the sense of modifying their behaviour in the light of knowledge of others’ actions and intentions, even negotiating amongst each other. This already happens in a limited way at unsignalised or four-way stop junctions, when simple rules may apply, such as priority from the right or “first-come first-served”. Such interaction can become much more sophisticated and bring widespread benefits if based on collective data collection and information sharing – provided that drivers obey the rules and follow the advice.

Key building blocks

The essential technology elements that need to be in place to support cooperative mobility include: wireless communication networks, wireless communication and positioning units in the vehicle, wireless and fixed communication units attached to roadside equipment, management, control and service centres running Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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cooperative applications, and the interface to users. For its basic communication technology, the CVIS project has settled on CALM (Continuous Air-interface Long and Medium range communications) architecture and specifications, based on standards developed in ISO TC/204, working group 16, as its basic communication technology. In order to maintain a continuous network connection while a vehicle is moving at speed, CALM enables use of all suitable existing communication channels, e.g. UMTS, and facilitates the integration of new ones as they are rolled out, e.g. Wi-MAX. The ability to use flexibly different communication channels should lead to a high quality of service and reduced communication costs. It also means that early services can be rolled out using existing networks. However being able to talk is still not good enough, cooperative systems need to speak the same language in order to understand each other. The CVIS project is devising a common language comprising a set of protocols and data models for a set of core application modules around which real applications and services can be developed. These common software modules allow applications to interact with users in their own language, while the open application management environment provides both a set of basic core services as well as an open platform for any kind of new collaborative service. Accurate positioning is a key requirement for cooperative systems, and the CVIS core platform includes an advanced positioning and mapping module. This will use GPS and Galileo (when available), as well as techniques based on the radio communication systems themselves, such as triangulation from wireless network nodes and registering the location of nearby transmitters such as Bluetooth. To provide sufficient accuracy, high-precision local maps of key infrastructure need to be created, that can be linked with real-time data on the position of the vehicles that happen to be nearby at that moment. In this future architecture, probably the great-

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est uncertainty concerns just which organisations need to be present and what they need to do.We look into this question in more depth below. Last but not least, the human being is the most important element in any cooperative system. The general approach in current cooperative system developments worldwide is based on providing drivers with information, guidance, advice and even commands (in the case of traffic control), but never actually taking over control of the vehicle. Although this would of course be quite possible even with today’s technology.

The driver is the centre of attention

Although one could be forgiven for thinking that the vehicle is at the heart of cooperative systems, with all the talk of “vehicle-to-vehicle” and “vehicle-to-infrastructure” communications, in fact ultimately a human being will be the object of such communications. While the simplest of cooperative systems will simply redistribute to the driver as traffic information the data just collected (with his consent of course) from his “probe vehicle” as it circulated in the road network, it is likely that more complex systems will be developed that require or allow a driver to follow advice or take the initiative. As an example, a system may send to each driver who happens to be within a cluster of vehicles approaching a traffic light an individualised recommended speed which, if he maintains that speed, will allow the cluster to pass on green and avoid stopping. To benefit, each driver must comply voluntarily with the speed recommendation. Success of this idea will depend on drivers learning quickly that they will get real benefits if they follow the advice.

The personal touch

If cooperative systems are a kind of club, we can ask how an individual would become a member. Will this be automatic once he buys a “communicating car”? Will his www.h3bmedia.com

CVIS car “talk” freely (and free of charge) to any suitably equipped roadside equipment without further ado? Or will he need to sign up for specific cooperative services – even to pay for them? Will there be a mix of free and pay services? Following this thread further, we can look at the person at the centre of the cooperative community. Since the collection of monitoring data from road users is such an important element in the cooperative cycle, users’ willingness to provide these data will be critical. They will need to be processed anonymously and in complete security, to avoid fears of a mass-media hyped “Big Brother”. Given their value, users who provide data could be offered credits towards their service subscription. This leads to the question of how users would “buy” cooperative services, whether singly or in bundles, and from whom. City residents might become subscribers to personal travel services provided by their local traffic authority, such as route assistance or parking services – these might be free of charge to locals but incur a fee for visitors.

Cooperative organisation

Probably the greatest uncertainty surrounds the question of which are the organisations that will need to be involved – or even to be set up – to make cooperative systems work. Clearly the vehicle manufacturers have a role, even if only to ensure that new vehicles will have the appropriate equipment installed. But once they can communicate directly with each vehicle they sell – and with each owner - why shouldn’t they seek to become a service provider to their customers, adding “vehicle relationship management” to the more traditional “customer relationship management”? Who will operate the backbone mobile communication networks? The cellular mobile network operators will have a role, at least for providing coverage outside

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built-up areas. But they too might see an interest to operate other types of wireless network such as WLAN or Wi-MAXTM, that are better able to support the direct, short-range communication requirements of cooperative systems. Is there also a need for a separate organisation to operate a dedicated “cooperative systems network” to handle the rather special needs for secure collection, management and delivery of data and related services, from and to vehicles? While CVIS is basing its technology around IPv6, this does not mean the “world wild web” – there is still a requirement for a protected network environment, and this may need to be managed. The cooperative services model depends on the collection of data from vehicles, the road network and the environment. Once processed and integrated, these data become the source of the information to drivers that propels the cycle of cooperation. Monitoring data will need to be managed by some organisation, although in practice it could be the traffic network operator or an existing service provider, or else a separate entity, either public, private or public-private. On the ground, there are all the infrastructure and fleet operators and other bodies that will want to install cooperative system communication links to their equipment in order to be able to interact with vehicles. This is crucial, since the cooperative system cycle will not be closed without such deployment. The problem is that there are so many different actors who could possibly be involved. This raises the question whether they need to be organised into some kind of business network in order that road users find a coherent offer of cooperative services rather than an indisciplined jungle? This goes to the heart of the nature of cooperative systems in practice: will this be nothing more than a new technology that anyone can adopt and instantly become a cooperative service provider? In this case there might

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CVIS be no need for any more than a label saying “complies with cooperative systems standards”. Otherwise, there will be a need for a much more structured approach in which the various operators and service providers would ensure a planned and coordinated deployment and in which cooperative service operations were also harmonised and controlled cooperatively.

So what is deployment?

What does deployment mean for cooperative systems? Certainly it’s not a simple matter of installing some loop detectors, traffic lights and a junction controller unit – as for a basic traffic control installation. The complexity of cooperative systems and the number of entities and decision-makers involved means that even cooperative system deployment needs to be cooperative! The main elements to be deployed include the following: • The vehicle: an onboard unit supporting wireless communication on the media chosen to deliver cooperative services, enabling a permanent Internet Protocol connection; • The roadside: a box linked to roadside installations that provides wireless communication to nearby vehicles (on the same media as implemented in the vehicle unit), with interfaces to existing roadside systems and onward to back-office services; • Τhe communication system: while existing cellular (2G, 3G…) data services will be one medium used for cooperative systems in order to ensure virtually complete coverage, there is a growing consensus that some kind of wireless local area network (WLAN or “Wi-Fi”) for vehicles is needed: a (mesh) network of local hotspots throughout cities and along main highways; in addition, communication units installed for tolling or access control (e.g. DSRC, infra-red) can be used to fill in the network. Also, Wi-MAX (“WMAN” or wireless metropolitan area networks) could be a future carrier if it should be deployed across urban areas and if the mobile version of the standard becomes the norm; • Operating and management centres: these are the elements that will make up the operational services running in the background and foreground, and that constitute the cycle of cooperation. They include data management centres, traffic management and control centres, emergency service centres, public transport and commercial fleet management centres, etc. As we’ve seen above, it is not so clear how and in what order deployment will take place in practice.Will vehicle makers begin installing communication units in their new cars, trucks and buses as soon as standards are fixed? Will city traffic authorities be first off the line to install communication units in equipment for traffic monitoring and control? Or will motorway operators take the lead? When will roadside equipment suppliers begin offering products adapted for cooperative systems?

Taking off

As the world of cooperative systems involves potentially so many different stakeholders it seems likely a

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special dedicated effort will be needed to make deployment happen in a suitably coordinated way. We would like to propose that Europe needs its own initiative to launch and then steer cooperative system deployment. The United States has its VII initiative, driven by the US DOT, and a VII Consortium made up of federal and state highway departments and the automotive industry, established “to determine feasibility of widespread deployment and to establish an implementation strategy”. Arguably the stakeholder community in Europe is more splintered than in America, hence the need is stronger for a European consortium – a “Cooperative System Alliance” or CSA – to drive implementation. Such a group could work to bring cooperative system implementation into the political arena at all levels from municipal to national to European Union. Coordination of public investment will be needed if the potential benefits for transport safety and efficiency and for the environment are to be realised. The European CSA could support individual stakeholder groups such as traffic management suppliers, mobile network operators, vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, motorway operators, fleet owners and operators and urban traffic authorities each to adopt a common approach for deployment, and then to coordinate deployment strategy across all sectors of the community.Without this common approach it is hard to see who would be willing to take a first step towards cooperative systems when there is a risk that necessary complementary investments are not going to materialise. Unfortunately, until now there is very little of cooperative systems visible to the average citizen and driver, so we should not expect deployment to be user-driven! All the more reason to deepen the experience gained through collaborative R&D projects and then to create public awareness through demonstrations and persuasive publicity for the results of cooperative system evaluations. Before then, let us have some good debate about what cooperative systems are, what benefits they can bring, and how to make them happen. TH CVIS, which is IP coordinated by ERTICO in EU FP6, started on 1 February 2006 and will finish in January 2010. The CVIS project acknowledges the support provided by the European Union through a grant of up to €22m towards the total project budget of €41m. The CVIS consortium has 60 members, from sectors including automotive manufacturers and suppliers, traffic system suppliers, public and private road operators, mobile network operators, motoring associations and research institutions. An open workshop on CVIS architectures will be held on 21 June in Aalborg, Denmark and ERTICO will jointly organise an international workshop on cooperative systems architectures the following day, also in Aalborg. For more information go to www.cvisproject.org or email Paul Kompfner, CVIS IP Manager or Zeljko Jeftic, Deputy CVIS IP Manager, at [email protected] www.h3bmedia.com

Ripple DSRC WAVE is entering field test mode this summer with truckers and the auto- and equipment manufacturers engaged. AMY ZUCKERMAN talks to some of the sector’s experts to see what’s on the cards and when... With all standards ready for publication and field tests about to be launched, it appears the auto, truck and toll world will soon learn whether a new radio technology will actually revolutionize the way we all travel, conduct business, seek resources and entertainment while driving on global highways. As of spring 2007, officials from various sectors reported that the first prototype transponders and receivers built to what the experts call the DSRC WAVE standards were scheduled for testing this summer somewhere in the metro Detroit, Mich. area. DSRC stands for dedicated short-range communication and WAVE stands for Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments. To the lay person, it is short-range radio, or wireless technology with a maximum reach of a kilometer. It has an assigned bandwidth. And it is not to be confused with Bluetooth, which is an extremely shortrange radio connection between electronic devices, inside the car, for example.

Part of the process

The evolution of the DSRC WAVE has been a lengthy, politicized process stretching over a decade. At this writing, the move from conceptualization to testing had hit a minor glitch with the official retirement of Bill Jones in February as the chief of the ITS Joint Program Office. Jones, who has fought since 1996 to create a national standard for short-range radio (and the roadside read-

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ers that are a part of the equation) reportedly continues to work part-time for the DOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), which now houses ITS activities. Tests were reportedly to start in late winter, but were stalled by the changing of the guard at DOT. Not only did Jones cut back hours starting in February, but the appointment of Shelley J. Row as the director of the ITS Joint Program office meant she had to get up to speed on DSRC WAVE. Roger Lutz,RITA spokesman,confirmed Row’s appointment as of 12 January 2007 and the fact that Jones would continue to have some influence on the future of DSRC WAVE applications. He explained that while Row was assuming control of the office, she wasn’t “taking over” or “running” the DSRC WAVE effort. Nor is she “making any changes staff-wise yet,” said Lutz. Neither Jones or Row were available for comment at press time. “Everyone is trying to adjust to the fact that Bill Jones isn’t really in the picture right now, at least on a day-today basis,” said Lee Armstrong, the standards expert who has played a key role in the development of DSRC WAVE for many years. According to Armstrong, now based in Southampton, MA, players from the transponder and reader industries to the standards developers and auto industry were on hold temporarily to see whether the new ITS Program Chief would make any www.h3bmedia.com

effect

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“ We are waiting for the next round of tests on the channelization and network layer before we set up product testing”

changes in the program, as is. On a positive front, Armstrong said all standards pertinent to manufactures were now approved for publication. In time, he said the lower-level standards that determine the wirelesss communication would gravitate from the old ASTM standard for WiFi – now stipulated as part of DSRC WAVE under the 2004 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandate – to a newer 802.11 standard in creation.When that is finished, he said the standards working group “will petition the FCC to allow use of the new standard, but it won’t hold up anything. From a purely technical view all the standards are published.” And that means that all stakeholders to the process, including the truck manufacturers and toll industry, can start working on a transition to DSRC WAVE technology along with the auto industry, which has been assessing embedding transponders in the networked car for several years now. According to Lutz, the Feds have been holding discussions with trucking stakeholders to assess use of the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) program although he had no details on who was talking to whom or what decisions, if any, were emerging from those sessions.

could be superseded by alternatives, such as GPS-enabled cell phones. Here’s one positive reason: DSRC WAVE is the first technology designed to work on the recently dedicated 5.9 gigahertz radio spectrum for intelligent transportation systems. Indeed, it is probably the first time that the U.S. government has mandated a single technology for this kind of communication. Plus it’s designed to work with the networked vehicle. For now, neither autos or trucks can use the same transponder for multiple pass-through toll collectors because various regions of the country have equipment built to different standards. The devices for New York, for example, won’t necessarily work in Los Angeles. Lacking a national standard, truckers have to carry a transponder for every toll region they use, not to mention separate transponders for border crossings and in some cases, weigh-station bypass. Once the prototype transponders are tested and the feds approve them, all future short-range radio technology will be built to the national specifications. In time, the aim is to move traffic more quickly and efficiently along U.S. roadways, which should aid in reducing congestion and emissions of greenhouse gases, while saving on costly fuel, experts say.

Why do we care?

Safety and business model

Why should traffic managers care about a technology that is only now being field-tested? After all, it’s a technology that some traffic management experts argue

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Then there are safety issues, which have concerned officials like Jones for many years. In interviews Jones has pointed out that by embedding the transponders in the www.h3bmedia.com

DSRC networked vehicle of the future, the driver would be able to send information from a truck’s computer “brain” to a roadside receiver. And being able to purchase a vehicle already equipped with a transponder rather than buying transponders separately takes the tolling industry out of selling equipment - which toll officials urgently desire. It also means that the technology has a better likelihood of being used, Jones has said. Representing the toll industry, Tim McGuckin, formerly of IBTTA, and now executive director of the Washington, DC-based OmniAir Consortium in Washington that is developing the DSRC standards-compliance certification program under US DOT Cooperative Agreement, says toll authorities would like to see the availability of a standards-based technology that enables competition in the market. And, yes, they would like to get out of the expensive business of selling transponders, which could well take place with the arrival of the new technology. McGuckin says he knows that the old and new systems will have to run side-by-side for while until VII penetration rates reach a threshold where operators are comfortable letting go of their existing systems – built to the old 915MHz band. Also, the hardware is sometimes the easiest part. It’s reconciling the competing business and operational requirements among the toll industry new entrants - auto manufacturers and banks - that poses new challenges, all of which McGuckin thinks are solveable over time.

systems strategy for DaimlerChrysler’s Research and Technology North America division, in Palo Alto, CA, isn’t worrying about competing technologies. He expects plans for the “proof of concept test” to yield results before the end of the year. “Plans are becoming more concrete and will likely take place in the Detroit region because the car companies are dominating the process, though there are no dates to report. The good news is that all of the car companies are involved,” said Wilson, who is also part of the VII Consortium that includes major world automakers such as BMW, Toyota and Nissan.

Safe and secure

Data security is another outstanding issue when considering transmitting valuable data at high speeds from almost a mile ahead of a toll booth, weigh station or border crossing. Experts agree, in general, that the new technology will require a dramatically different approach than protecting data today. And they say it won’t be just tolling info that needs to be secure, but also vehicle-to-vehicle transmissions and even transmissions from safety vehicles to utilities and infrastructures like bridges and tunnels. Encryption experts are reportedly working on incorporating security safeguards in the DSRC format. According to government officials, an ongoing prototype project will, hopefully, create a security model for U.S. toll authorities and others. On top of this sudden activity in an area that appeared to be near dormant only a year or so ago, the tolling industry appears to be sorting out an approach to implanting new roadside or overhead readers that would work with DSRC WAVE-based transponders.

“That’s been the plan all along - to gather data to assess the potential for this technology until 2008 - and we’re on target”

What about obsolescence?

Of course, experts like Armstrong know that the vehicle manufacturers aren’t about to fiddle with their car and truck designs for multiple transponders. The cost would be prohibitive. But what of obsolescence? That’s a question that experts such as John Collins, now a vice president at Traffic.com and former president of trade association ITS America, have been asking. Consider the potential for GPS-enabled cell phones to keep track traffic of flow rather than using radio-based transponders. And there are questions arising about whether WiFi, familiar to many laptop users, is better for short-range communication. Both Armstrong and transponder manufacturers like Dick Schnacke downplay those concerns. Schnacke, who is vice president of TransCore, a major transponder and wireless technology provider in Dallas, points out that the acquisition time - the time it takes for one device to connect with another - is far shorter by transponder. Says Schnacke, DSRC WAVE will allow you to get a message to someone “very quickly, much faster than making a phone call and waiting for a connection.” We’re talking about milliseconds as compared to a few seconds to set up Wi-Fi. “That could be life or death in an emergency situation,” he said. Christopher Wilson, vice president of transportation www.h3bmedia.com

Where are the truckers?

Lutz was not a liberty to comment on which trucking companies or entities were actually talking to the government. Claiming the government was at least a year out from making any decisions, he said informationgathering would continue until 2008. “That’s been the plan all along - to gather data to assess the potential for this technology until 2008 - and we’re on target,” he said. Although aware that DOT officials like Jones had long promoted short-range radio to the trucking industry, Wilson was unaware of presentations that Jones was reportedly making to unidentified players in trucking. In late Fall 2006, Wilson said things were pretty much stalled for applying DSRC WAVE-based technology to trucks and believed it would take a mandate from a major shipper like Wal-Mart to convince the truck manufactures to embed DSRC WAVE transponders in new makes. “There’s an awareness lag in the trucking world. DSRC WAVE offers a lot of advantages for them,” Wilson concluded. TH Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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The Thought Process

Pete Costello Program Manager, ITS, PBS&J, Florida

My ITS career began at ITS America in June 1998 working with the Membership Department. Within a year, I had moved over to the technical side of the association and began working with many of the industry committees – ATIS, APTS, ATMS, ARTS, EPS and others in that “alphabet soup.” I feel that I got my Masters at ITS America and made the most of my time there learning from my colleagues on staff and members in organizations around the world. I realized that in many ways the US was “advanced” in ITS like the A’s in the committee names, but also that we could learn from the many projects around the world that were much more advanced and cutting edge. I remember a meeting where Harry Voccola of NAVTEQ talked about the future where ITS would be utilized to eliminate fatalities and injuries suffered on the transportation network. This struck a chord with me and each day I go to the office knowing that my work with traveler information systems, like 511, helps the public make informed decisions about their safety while traveling. In the US, we all know that over 3,000 military personnel have made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq – USA Today publishes their cause of death, name, rank and hometown each day. But what about the 40,000 plus that die each year on America’s roadways? This is the rough equivalent of a Boeing 737 aircraft crashing each day (the worldwide total would be 10 of those 737s every day) and I do not see their names in USA Today. The 737 just accounts for the fatalities, what about the human cost of those who are injured and maimed? I was able to walk away from a car that was totaled and feel the pain from another person’s inattention which wrecked my car and impacted every day of my life. I actually thanked the ITS America member contact for the good work of their engineers in designing my car! I applaud Dr. Rick Martinez (former National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator) and Neil Schuster for ITS America’s adopting of the “Vision Zero” concept and look forward to achieving that vision. So how are we going to get to achieve the vision? Will it be automated highways? I am not sure if American drivers will give up “control” – I wouldn’t mind going to sleep in my car in Orlando and waking up in Nashville though. What about vehicle infrastructure integration (VII)? I am intrigued by the amount of data on the transportation network that VII promises, but I am concerned about the investment of billions of dollars for a network of roadside infrastructure when the mobile phone and

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satellite radio companies have already invested billions in building those networks – can they be used for VII? I think so. It will be interesting to see what developments arise from the Federal Congestion Initiative as well. In my mind, ITS is an information overlay on the transportation network. When I joined the industry, I was astonished that the network was not “lit up” and assumed that someone knew what was happening out there. Someday, we will get there! Should we care that the public does not know what “ITS” is? I don’t think so. I remember having to tell family and friends about intelligent transportation systems and they thought it was fuel cells powering vehicles or the like. But everyone can easily get their brain around dialing 511 and getting traffic and transportation information. Some of the project-related things that I got the most satisfaction out of were consumer focus groups. I know some people question their benefits but where a public servant from a DOT got to “hear from their customers” (and see them behind a one-way mirror) – I could almost see the light bulbs going on above their heads as the travelers spoke and ideas clicked for the DOT staff. I am proud that I serve as project manager for the North Carolina DOT’s 511 service. I believe that it is one of the best telephone-based traveler information systems in the world and hope that you will call it at (877) 511-INNC and check out the multimodal information. I am one of the few who got a kick out of international standards harmonization. You say ‘coach’ and we say ‘bus.’ Because I truly believe that ITS standards will help us all achieve our vision and goals for the safe and efficient transportation of people and goods. It is not news that public servants get a bad rap, but I am genuinely humbled by the dedicated, talented and high energy ITS people at the Federal, state and local levels around the world. I believe that most of the industry is on email 24/7 with their instantaneous responses at all hours. Teddy Roosevelt said that everyone should give back to their industry by participating in its associations and I strongly encourage that you do so as well. TH Interview by Kevin Borras www.h3bmedia.com

“What about the 40,000 people dieison “What ITS who can do America’s every support policyroads objectives I don’t see their and year? improve knowledge, names listedand in USA information Today” management” www.h3bmedia.com

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IROC stakeholders toured the Austin collocated facility, an impressive operations center that includes TxDOT, City of Austin Police/Fire/EMS dispatch, Travis County Sheriff 911, CapMetro Transit Dispatch, and a regional Emergency Operations Center. Austin provided an exceptional model of multiagency operations procedures and agreements, which they cite as key to successful collocated operations

Combining forces

KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done… Collocated transportation/incident management facilities are taking regional system operations to the next level. A few pioneers have led the way with this concept – Houston’s TranStar, the Austin Combined Transportation and Emergency Communication Center, Minnesota DOT’s Regional Transportation Management Center, FAST in Las Vegas, just to name a few. Transportation management agencies are trying to meet 24/7 operational requirements, and the concept of ‘system operations’ encompasses more than transportation management – critically interwined are incident and emergency management, traveler information, and public transportation operations. States and regions are seeing tremendous benefits to bringing these key operations functions together – not only is there the obvious benefit of fostering stronger institutional coordination by means of ‘shoulder-toshoulder’ proximity, but there are also key economic benefits – common systems, economy of scale for system and equipment purchases, and enhanced multiagency response to critical incidents which saves time and lives and keeps transportation networks moving. While these are fantastic concepts, bringing multiple agencies together – under one roof – is not without its complexities. The process to get from concept to actual collocated operations is a multi-step, and multi-year undertaking, requiring commitment to common goals from the operations level all the way up the ranks to elected officials. This article looks at some important development and planning aspects of two collocated centers, and some of the issues that each region is working through. The first is the Interagency Regional Operations Center (IROC).

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IROC partners kicked-off a concept development effort in Spring 2006 to begin establishing needs, requirements and developing an operational concept for a multi-agency facility in the Boise Area. The second case study is the Public Safety Transportation Operations Center (PSTOC) in Northern Virginia, which is preparing to migrate several state and county agencies into a collocated facility that is set to open in 2008.

Idaho IROC case study

The Interagency Regional Operations Center (IROC) in the Boise metropolitan area marks a significant step for agencies in the region in terms of coordinated and enhanced transportation system operations. Undoubtedly, there are some unique operational arrangements already in place among IROC partners, in terms of joint operations of equipment and systems, although the majority of these are currently happening in separate locations. A 2005 feasibility study, led by the Ada County Highway District (ACHD), concluded that a centralized operations facility with transportation, incident and emergency management, and potentially public transportation was an important strategy for agencies in the region to pursue. There were several benefits to collocating these mission-critical operations functions: closer and more effective coordination for day-to-day operations and incident management/response, economies of scale for equipment and systems, multi-agency operations strategies and ability to share technical and staff resources were among the top priorities that moved the IROC planning effort forward. www.h3bmedia.com

Traffic Management Learn from other collocated ops facilities

While there is not a one-size-fits-all approach for collocated operations, other similar centers can provide valuable insights and models for how to bring multiple agencies together in a collocated operations environment. At the outset of the Concept of Operations development, key IROC stakeholders did a scanning tour of other collocated operations centers throughout the country – the RTMC in Minneapolis, CTECC in Austin, and the FAST/NHP center in Las Vegas. These centers included state or local transportation management, public safety dispatch, and in the case of Austin also included local police, transit and fire/EMS dispatch In addition to seeing layout, size, security measures, operations area, equipment and systems, the Idaho tour group was also able to ask critical questions about “chain of command”, how decisions are made with different agencies under one roof, what kinds of agreements were in place, how operations funding is handled, and other aspects that are key to making multi-agency operations really work.

Establish governance structure concepts early in the process Regional and statewide operations

Operating agencies that expressed a strong interest in looking at collocation in a centralized facility span local, regional and statewide contexts. Key stakeholders such as Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) headquarters and State Emergency Communications (State EMS) have a statewide perspective and service area and both are a pivotal link for the other five ITD Districts throughout the state as well as coordination with neighboring states. On a more regional level, ITD District 3 (in Boise) and the Idaho State Police dispatch serve a significant portion of western and southwestern Idaho. Locally, ACHD manages the arterial network in the Boise metro area, but also serves a key role for metro area freeway management from its TMC in Boise. At present, current operating facilities of potential IROC partners make it difficult to expand to meet future needs.

Institutional issues in concept development

ITD is serving as the contract manager and lead for the Phase II IROC Planning effort to develop a Concept of Operations, Site/Location Analysis, Space Requirements and Implementation Plan. This Phase II study was initiated in Spring 2006, and will wrap up later in 2007. While this Phase II effort has several areas of emphasis, what became clear during the early stages of the Concept of Operations was that there were some key overarching policy, institutional, and governance issues – somewhat separate from operational responsibilities - that would need to be addressed front and center for the multi-agency IROC program to be a success. www.h3bmedia.com

From the very early stages of the Phase II effort, potential IROC partners raised important concerns about governance and agency relationships. Would this be a landlord-tenant kind of arrangement? How would decisions be made once we are all in the facility? Would one partner have a ‘stronger voice’ in facility operations than others? These kinds of questions prompted a stronger focus on establishing some guiding principles about the IROC governance structure. TMCs visited on the tour provided some good insights on how organizational structures and policies could be implemented. Over the course of two workshops, a strawman governance structure was developed to guide the coalition-building efforts over the next several years. IROC partners were very clear on governance principles: • Fair-share funding formula; • Standard operating procedures for operational as well as facility interactions; • One agency = one vote; • Partner input and consensus on policies and decisions affecting operations or the facility; • Centralized facility manager to handle administrative, some IT support, and common areas; • Agency autonomy for certain policies (benefits, staff classifications, etc.); • Different levels of collective decision making – a supervisors group, a managers group and an executive level group.

Provide some level of flexibility for partner commitment in the early planning stages

Multi-year project. Five-year horizon for implementation. Unknowns about ultimate cost, but recognizing it would take several million dollars to implement. Strong competition with other transportation funding needs. Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Ada County’s TMC is the nerve center for Boise area freeway and arterial management. Operators at ACHD’s TMC monitor freeway and arterial CCTV, provide regional traveler information, and support incident management activities

These and other concerns can make it very difficult for potential partners to be able to fully commit to collocate in the early planning stages of a collocated facility. To address this dynamic, and to provide some level of commitment to continue partner discussions, a phased ‘opt-in’ process was established for IROC. During the ConOps development, partners were asked to indicate their ‘opt-in’ status at key points in the planning process, and a stronger level of commitment would be needed as certain project milestones were reached.. Getting some firm level of partner commitment is key, but some partners may not be able to commit too early when the full picture of cost, location and other factors are not yet finalized.

Look ahead to funding needs

IROC is aiming at a 2011 timeframe for implementation. The successor of the federal SAFETEA-LU transportation legislation will likely be in place. At the local level, funds are stretched thin, and projects are programmed for the next 3-5 years. Depending on the partners, there could be some additional funding source opportunities. In the case of IROC, State EMS draws funds from emergency and health related federal sources as well as some discretionary funds at the state level. Developing a funding strategy – even though ultimate construction and operations costs were not yet finalized – will help position IROC to be able to look at a range of funding options and be able to strategically look ahead to funding needs. As one funding option, ITD is considering funding the initial capital expense, and then recovering the costs from partners annually over 10 years. Other strategies may focus more on up-front, lump-sum payments by partners, with capital costs divvied based on how much space these partners are envisioned to occupy.

Keep decision makers part of the process

Although an actual facility may be several years in the future, champions at the decision maker level (local, regional and state) are essential for IROC. Outreach presentations to the ITD Board, COMPASS planning organizations, Ada County commission and transit management committee were made prior to each opt-in milestone to promote awareness of the project efforts,

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as well as obtain some input on decision maker ‘hot button’ issues – which could easily turn into insurmountable obstacles if not addressed. Some entities were concerned that IROC would be establishing a new agency. Others wondered why the operational functions couldn’t be better handled with a virtual approach. The need for tangible, quantifiable benefits to making the investment in IROC was also articulated from these entities. These decision-making groups bring a very different perspective to the facility planning, and their support. At the time of this writing, the IROC project is looking at available land, completing a threat and vulnerability assessment for the facility, and developing preliminary facility layout options based on the current partner opt-in status and operational requirements. Following these tasks, an implementation plan will be developed to guide the next four years of planning, construction, and agency migration to the collocated facility.

VA PSTOC case study – agency migration

Agencies in Northern Virginia are much further along with their collocated operations facility, and in fact, have a 2008 target for the PSTOC facility to be operational. Orchestrating the design phase of a new or renovated facility requires several coordination meetings amongst the stakeholders that will occupy the facility in conjunction with the architect/engineer design team. The PSTOC design and implementation was divided into two phases: 1) the physical facility, and 2) the Audio/ Visual distribution system and displays throughout the facility. The first phase has been completed, and the second phase is scheduled to be completed by late Spring 2007 in order to achieve opening the new facility by Summer 2008. Once completed, Fairfax County, the Department of Public Safety Communications, the Office of Emergency Management, the Virginia Department of Transportation, and the Virginia State Police will have a combined presence in the PSTOC.The PSTOC facility will be nearly 150,000 square feet with two building components: the Main PSTOC, and forensics facilities and other support functions. Agencies in the PSTOC will have the ability to access one another’s video sources, as well as the ability to restrict access to those outside the center if security and/or privacy. Therefore, when designing for collocation, the agencies involved must grapple with access provisions both inside (partner agencies) and outside (the public) of the facility. Access privileges must be considered from three different points of view: resource level, physical entry (into various rooms), and network connections. Equally important are the discussions surrounding the use and allocation of common areas. In Northern Virginia, this has involved several tabletop workshop discussions amongst the partner agencies in order to simulate the proposed simultaneous www.h3bmedia.com

Traffic Management uses of the facility. These exercises help identify the physical connectivity and technology needs in various parts of the facility. In most cases, color coding cable schemes become necessary to support the management of each agency’s communication requirements throughout the facility.

Implementation/migration phase

Moving beyond the design phase into the implementation phase requires a lot of preparation on the part of all agencies involved, particularly when you are moving mission critical 24 x 7 x 365 operations. The implementation phase includes at least seven key steps: 1. Establishing a baseline inventory of critical equipment that will either be moved or replicated (e.g. servers, workstations, network switches/routers, and communication head-end equipment for communication with field devices) 2. Identify what equipment will be relocated to, or replicated at, the combined facility. Additionally, identify what equipment will be abandoned or simply remain at the existing facilities. 3. Analyze, document, and review the potential operational interruptions, procedural risks, and migration options/alternatives with affected staff and IT/software management teams. 4.Provide context-oriented procedures (e.g.sequence of events) for the transition, along with a fallback plan at key phases of the transition procedures to protect against unexpected snags/events. 5. Identify equipment procurement options and migration service contract options. 6. Test communication connectivity for the required functionality before commencing final relocation. 7. Carry-out the relocation according to the migration plan with contingencies.

Communications considerations

In Northern Virginia, VDOT faces a larger communication issue than the partnering agencies since the vast majority of its field devices are connected to its current operations center with fiber optics. Additionally, a great degree of the existing infrastructure uses a point-topoint communication architecture. Agencies with a similar architecture will need to closely evaluate alternatives for migration into the new combined operations center. Two key alternatives were evaluated for Northern Virginia, namely: 1) migrating field communication hubs to an Ethernet architecture with redundant paths to the proposed center as well as the existing center; and 2) relocating and/or replacing point-to-point fiber multiplexing equipment and reconnecting it at the proposed center. For VDOT the choice quickly became clear due to other construction projects that would have a great potential to hamper the second alternative. Therefore, a separate initiative to install an Ethernet fiber ring connecting the PSTOC and STC with the field communication hubs was established. In VDOT’s case, the existing center will still function as a remote field communications relay hub, along with www.h3bmedia.com

supporting other limited operations that could not be completely housed in the combined facility (i.e. Safety Service Patrol staff). However, if an agency is completely vacating their existing center, decisions regarding the re-allocation and/or demise of the existing center should also be addressed in the implementation plan. Most agencies in combined centers attempt to share leased lines whenever possible, to minimize the operational costs. However, each agency’s Information Technology staff must come to agreements on how connections will be shared and where/how they will touch each other’s networks. Careful deployment and configuration of firewalls, virtual private networking (VPN), and agency enterprise network access systems must be accommodated.

Media considerations

Many transportation operations centers around the country have a dedicated room or media connection pedestal for on-site news correspondents, not to mention providing traffic camera video feeds for re-broadcast by news agencies. Where space in a combined facility is at a premium, allowing any and all news channels to have access to camera video feeds using varying arrays of communication equipment presents both network security and spatial concerns, particularly when it comes to providing access to digital video sources. Unlike traditional analog video distribution approaches, today’s modern combined centers are being deployed with advanced digital video management networks, which requires a different method for restricting access and/or blocking it altogether. As with physical security concerns, policy planners and design committees should closely evaluate each user group’s access needs, and the potential security risks therein. TH Lisa Burgess is with Kimley-Horn & Associates in Phoenix, AZ. Jon Chambers is with KHA’s Virginia Beach, VA, office. They can be contacted via email at [email protected] and [email protected] The Idaho State EMS communications is collocated with Idaho State Police dispatch. A video wall in the comm center allows State EMS to view highway CCTV images. They have after-hours control of ITD’s CCTV and dynamic message signs

Bruce Abernethy’s

POSTCARDS FROM CHINA While traveling around China as a tourist earlier this year, BRUCE ABERNETHY, a traffic engineer for over 40 years, couldn’t resist taking hundreds of photos and making copious notes of some of the more interesting traffic-related developments that he came across. More a travelogue than an in-depth exploration of China’s ITS program, his keen eye for detail makes for fascinating reading About four years ago I supported an ITS seminar for traffic engineers in Beijing, the capital of the People’s Republic of China. Recently I returned to China as a tourist, visiting seven cities. This article documents my observations made as a tourist but of course focusing on the status of transportation and ITS. In the four years since visiting Beijing, the number of vehicles on the arterial corridors has seemingly increased significantly with equal decrease in air quality. While previously in Beijing, I encountered one of the infamous dust storms caused by high winds over the Gobi Desert that resulted in near zero visibility and breathing difficulties. What I experienced during this recent visit to China was arterial corridors with volume of traffic exceeding capacity during peak traffic in the morning and late afternoon with air pollution that made breathing as difficult as in a Beijing dust storm. This was true in just about all of the cities that I visited. China is now experiencing issues with congestion management and air quality caused by motor vehicles that will pose a challenge to them as it does in Europe and the United States. www.h3bmedia.com

Transportation

All of the major cities that I visited in China had a modern mix of private vehicles, commercial vehicles, and public transportation vehicles on corridors. True, there were a number of motor scooters and motorcycles as well as motor driven bicycles and manual bicycles. Some of the cities had separate corridors for “two wheelers” and “three wheelers”. All of the cities that I visited had modern public transit vehicles. Because China is a very popular tourist destination, the corridors had a significant number of tour busses. Most of the major cities have water channels that were utilized for water taxis and tour boats as well as commercial transportation and fishing boats. China seems to be stressing a balance of public transportation including rail, boat and bus. Cities in the USA should consider the benefits of modern water taxies such as used in Europe and Asia. While it is true that visitors will see older versions of transportation, such as hand pulled carts and even horse drawn carts in the rural areas as well as bicycles converted to carry an unbelievable load of cargo, China definitely has modern motor vehicles. There were many Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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All photographs by Bruce Abernethy

China vehicle maintenance facilities visible and the number of disabled vehicles observed on corridors was perhaps significantly less than I have observed in other countries. Perhaps the Chinese owner of a motor vehicle is proud of having a vehicle and wants to keep it in a good state of repair.

Road Infrastructure

China has emphasized modernizing its transportation infrastructure. Cities have modern arterial corridors, freeways and tollways. Airports in most of the major cities are large and modern. In fact, most of the airports have a significant amount of expansion area within terminal facilities. There is a growing trend for tollways and tollways are designed to accommodate commercial vehicle traffic.

Toll Roads

I had an opportunity to drive on half a dozen toll roads. My tour guides informed me that the position of toll collector was a sought after profession. They supposedly were well paid for their service. The toll roads and plazas were modern but I did not observe any open toll roads with electronic fee collection. All of the toll roads that I drove on had manual toll collection systems but the tol roads were well marked and many were equipped with dynamic message signs. Video enforcement is quite popular on the tollways which were significantly less congested than the freeways.

ITS Deployment

All of the cities that I visited had modern traffic signal control but it wasn’t clear if the traffic signals were managed by a Central Traffic Management Center. (As a tourist, I did not investigate the details of traffic signal control.) In most cities, standard traffic control heads were utilized and most observed were energy-conserving LEDs. PEDs and ADA enhancements were utilized, including an audio signal to identify permissive pedestrian crossing. In fact I was impressed at the ADA infrastructure deployed at most tourist sites in China. Wheelchairs are available at most tourist sites and provisions have been made for wheelchair users. In several cities a single traffic control signal (versus three separate lights in one signal head) was utilized and LEDs facilitated this single light to turn from red to yellow to green. Some major intersections had small DMS that displayed wait time remaining before the signal changed. Directional electronic signs with LED arrows were frequently utilized. Both small DMS were utilized on arterial corridors and large DMS (some multicoloured) were utilized on freeways. Most messaging was solely in Mandarin Chinese, as would be expected. Probably the most impressive DMS was a graphical display of the freeway corridor with LEDs that could identify particular road segments’ congestion status. This is similar to freeway graphics available from traveler information web sites in the USA. The benefits of this graphical, colour-capable, DMS is that drivers can observe current congestion status en-route. The bottom www.h3bmedia.com

section of the DMS provided text (in Chinese) related to the corridor congestion conditions. Even accident locations could be displayed as well as information on the accident. This is truly an effective messaging device. Corridors had CCTV surveillance. Some intersections had CCTV surveillance cameras which may also have incorporated a video detection function. New CCTV camera technology in the USA include wide dynamic range, image stabilization, advanced privacy zone set up utilizing variable geometry as well as detection zone capability. VIDS were observed on some freeways and most likely were deployed to obtain traffic-related information, to determine congestion status and to support incident detection. It is assumed that there was a Traffic Management Center to monitor video and traffic-related data collection. It has to be said that traffic signal timing could be improved in China. The cycle length of some of the major intersections far exceeded that which would be utilized in the USA, or in Europe. It seemed that traffic signal co-ordination could also be improved but this may be a difficult task due to the heavy congestion on major corridors. Also consideration must be given to the movement of the slower bicycles and “two/three wheeler” motorized vehicles. The volume of these slower vehicles far exceed what is encountered in the USA, at least. My conclusion is that the Chinese are aggressively deploying ITS technology and that their deployment of the colour, graphical DMS indicates that they are fast becoming leaders in some aspects of ITS technology.

Emergency Management

I saw a number of accidents while on corridors in China. Most of them involved a commercial vehicle and a car. Commercial vehicles in China seem to be mainly driven by aggressive drivers (not that this situation is particularly exclusive to China of course). Another problem seen many times was that drivers ignore flashing lights and sirens of emergency vehicles. I saw very few vehicles attempt to move out of the path of an emergency vehicle. While detection of an incident seems to be reasonably rapid, the travel time of the emergency vehicle is negatively impacted by non-responsive drivers. Emergency vehicles seemed to be modern and emergency response staff well-trained.

Summary

I was very impressed with China’s investment in transportation infrastructure as well as its ITS deployment. There are some lessons to be learned in China related to new ITS technology and especially progress made in deployment of an ADA-friendly pedestrian environment. There is a pressing problem that China needs to address and this is improved air quality and associated reduction in vehicle emissions. China is a very interesting place to visit, especially for a traffic engineer, and tourism is growing as rapidly as some of its cities. TH Bruce Abernethy is president of Vector Alpha Systems Inc, based in Dallas, Texas and can be contacted via email at [email protected] Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Sting quartet YUKA RICHARD WEILAND KEVINGOMI, AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for and VALERIE SHUMAN present surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if the Four Fearsome Fallacies in have done… we’ve come as far as we should ITS Development We want to start out, right away, by admitting to some bias, or at least to some prior dispositions. This mainly reflects our background – we came to ITS in the 1980s from the software and systems industry, not from transportation engineering or vehicle manufacturing. This gives us a particularly systems-centered viewpoint on the application of information technologies to transportation; that is, on ITS. We are enthusiastic about the way that software can leverage and expand the power of devices, both in vehicles and in the infrastructure. We are excited about the ways that wireless communications can link these devices and systems into a connected whole. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the pitfalls that lie in the path of good software development and deployment and the risks that accompany an increasingly interconnected ITS community of vehicles and systems. In particular, we are concerned that the intelligent transportation industry is making many of the same design and development mistakes that the IT industry did starting back in the ‘60s, especially as vehicles begin to communicate with the infrastructure and with one another. Having helped to make the earlier round of mistakes doesn’t make us smarter than anyone else, but we do wish that at least some of the same lessons didn’t have to be learned and the same battles fought all over again from scratch. Those who do not learn from history are not only doomed to repeat it, but to pay for it again. This brings us to our other predisposition, which you might as well know about up front. We believe, at least in the medium term, that a sensible way for vehicles to communicate with the infrastructure and one another for most purposes is through a land-based vehicle com-

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munications clearinghouse that is capable of talking with any communications-equipped vehicle on the road regardless of its make, model, age, creed, color, national origin, etc. We would like some day to operate such a utility as one of our businesses. By the end of this article, we hope to persuade you (among other things) that we want to be in this business because we think this approach makes sense, and not vice versa. So, in our cheerfully didactic way, we would like to highlight four traditional system development fallacies that seem to us to be showing up in ITS thinking today.

Fallacy #1 – Everything Will Work

OK, you’ve met Murphy and have familiarised yourself with his law and you don’t really believe that nothing will go wrong, but life continues to be filled with examples of major systems in which the need for speedy deployment or up-front cost containment triumphed over planning for (maybe even thinking about) the things that can go wrong. Early in 2007, one of us attended a planning meeting in Beijing for the 2007 ITS World Congress. International www.h3bmedia.com

Telematics

“Those who do not learn from history are not only doomed to repeat it, but to pay for it again”

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internet services for web access and email were almost totally unavailable during this visit, and we learned that authors from outside of Asia were having great difficulty submitting papers to the Beijing-based World Congress website. We emphasize that this was not a failure of the World Congress organizers. Internet access and a lot of other telecommunications services between the entire continent of Asia and the rest of the world were largely unavailable. The cause was a December 2006 earthquake near Taiwan that severed eight of the 10 undersea fiber cables that carry data communications to and from Asia. All of these cables were laid along exactly the same undersea path, no doubt the least-cost path, which by bad luck turned out to be close by the epicenter of the December earthquake. The “Why not save a few bucks, what could go wrong?”attitude that led to creating a single-threaded communications route has now cost businesses on both sides of the Pacific billions of dollars, as well as causing significant headaches for those of us helping to organize the Beijing ITS World Congress. We recognize that not every contingency can be anticipated. We recognize that providing safeguards in advance against every imaginable contingency is not likely to be cost effective. However, our observation is that erring on the side of too much disaster planning is not usually the problem. In ITS, an important area to think about what can go wrong is probe data processing. Probe data processing is generally understood to be the production of good information about the driving environment by fusing sensor data from multiple vehicles in an area, in combination with data from other sources. The idea is to improve a vehicle’s understanding of its driving environment by pooling its sensor data with other vehicles. At present, the highest profile use for probe data is nearreal-time traffic information. This is an interesting and potentially money-making application. However, we believe that, ultimately, the most important use of probe data will be to improve the performance of on-board safety systems by increasing the reach of vehicle sensors beyond the capabilities of any particular vehicle on its own. Within the realm of probe processing, there are clearly a number of things that could go wrong. Some of them are local – for example, a particular vehicle’s data radio may be broken, preventing it from either sending or receiving safety-related messages. That’s unfortunate, but at least it’s probably self-contained. The more interesting thing that can go wrong is that the vehicle’s sensors stop working properly. Perhaps the vehicle’s determination of its own location is inaccurate. Perhaps the braking sensor activates too easily, incorrectly concluding that an emergency braking situation has arisen when none exists. Perhaps the radar system that estimates the position of other vehicles develops a fault. Perhaps the road and pavement condition sensors looking for rough or slippery spots are out of kilter. This situation can result in a much more insidious kind of problem in which the vehicle communicates bad data Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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It is generally true that most people behave pretty much properly nearly all of the time. Unfortunately, from a systems viewpoint, it doesn’t take very many exceptions to spoil the party. As we were starting to write this paragraph, a newsletter arrived from our internet service provider hawking their latest hacker protection product and reporting,“Every three minutes, a new form of malicious software is unleashed onto the Internet.” Recently, Microsoft released its new Windows Vista® operating system, whose design was shaped in significant part by the need to address the ease and frequency with which Windows XP® was attacked by hackers and viruses. And the web, of course, remains full of fraud – Nigerian funds transfer, anyone? ITS has, on the whole, been fairly free from this kind of attack so far, partly because many applications are still in the early stages of deployment, partly because fairly few ITS activities involve money changing hands, and partly because most ITS applications have been pretty much self-contained, either in the vehicle or within the infrastructure. Where there are exceptions to these generalizations (e.g., electronic toll collection and contactless public transportation fare cards), fraud and hacking have inevitably reared their ugly heads. More to the point, the coming proliferation of communicationsenabled ITS applications greatly expands the avenues for malicious and illegal system assault. Major cooperative programs like US DOT’s Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) initiative are generating significant public interest and are likely to result in widespread deployment, and we have to be concerned that hackers will not be far behind. Separate from the occasional failure of on-board sensors and other components of the ITS information exchange environment, it is inevitable that some troubled souls are going to deliberately introduce spurious information into the mix. They will try to route vehicles

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Fallacy #2 – Everyone Will Behave

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to the rest of the world, sounding alarms when there is no actual problem, or vice versa. It is a real challenge for an individual vehicle to make the determination whether a particular warning message from another vehicle is accurate. In our view, a far more reliable way of determining that a hazardous situation has developed is to collect an overlapping set of readings from multiple vehicles and discard any outliers. A central facility, such as a landbased communications utility, can stay in communication with a large number of vehicles simultaneously and can readily muster the necessary computing resources to analyze data from multiple sources and discard bad items. The vehicle whose sensors aren’t working right is basically going to be the one that is transmitting sensor readings that are inconsistent with those the utility receives from other vehicles in the area. The utility can even report the detected malfunction back to the vehicle that provided the bad reading and recommend that it take its readings offline pending some repairs and adjustments.

“Erring on the side of too much disaster planning is not usually the problem” toward incidents and congestion, abuse signal priority facilities to change all signals to red (or worse, all to green) at an intersection, broadcast spurious crash information to send emergency response services on wild goose chases, or transmit sham emergency braking alerts to get other vehicles to inappropriately jam on their brakes and get rear-ended. There are, fortunately, some standard defenses against this kind of hacking, which can detect and eliminate malicious messages and even to help track down their originators. Among other things, this is the realm of message authentication, a series of techniques used to assure that uncorrupted messages are coming from a trusted source. This kind of authentication, along with the employment of other safeguards against malicious communications, is well-suited to a land-based message handling utility. One of the essential jobs of such a utility would be to keep current on ITS threats, to incorporate the full range of communications protections and prophylaxis, and to assist enthusiastically in pinpointing the perpetrators of malicious ITS communications. Given such a utility, an individual vehicle would only have to ensure that the messages it accepts come exclusively and authentically from the utility and to reject messages from any other source. www.h3bmedia.com

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Fallacy #3 – Everyone Will Behave Sensibly

Let’s now depart the world of sociopaths and get back to just plain folks like ourselves. The double-edged sword of many IT systems is that we get used to them. On the plus side, getting used to systems means needing to spend less time to make them work and less mysterious in their operation.But there’s a downside as well. The voice recognition system that seemed really clever the first time we used it (say to get flight status information over the phone), gets to be pretty annoying as we hear its “informal”,“friendly” responses being given exactly the same way every time we call. At that point, we stop paying careful attention to the system and start looking for shortcuts to speed up our interactions. This natural tendency on the part of ordinary system users like ourselves makes the design of user interfaces difficult. It’s hard to anticipate how a widely varying population is going to react to a system the first time, the second time, the 14th time, and the 100th time (or to effectively accommodate the amount of time that has elapsed between visits). For relatively simple systems there are some good generalizations, such as “give a user the opportunity to indicate whether he or she is a newcomer to the system or an old hand”. For experienced, fairly frequent users, some shortcuts are going to be very welcome. However, this approach doesn’t work www.h3bmedia.com

so well for more complex systems or for systems that are only used rarely, since users may well think of themselves as experienced while forgetting exactly how the system actually works. In safety-related ITS systems, this is an inevitable problem, since even long-time users of safety applications will be infrequent users – crash and near-crash situations fortunately don’t happen that often, relative to the total amount of travel. An additional problem faces us, as well. What starts out being confidence that the system will help to keep us safe often becomes complacency or overconfidence. An often quoted but still surprising statistic is that antilock brakes don’t appear to reduce the number of crashes – ask your insurance guy. The apparent reason is that when people get used to having antilock brakes, they tend to drive less cautiously on slippery surfaces, effectively counteracting the benefits that ABS tries to provide. Other ITS applications may have similar unintended consequences. For example, a night vision system that is meant to help drivers spot on-the-road hazards to increase safety could potentially have the opposite effect. In low visibility conditions, drivers who have developed a high level of confidence in the night vision system may use the display as a substitute, rather than as a supplement, to carefully watching the road. Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Telematics Table 1: Fallacy Summary Fallacy

Reality

Solutions to Consider

#1 Everything Will Work

Vehicle sensors may malfunction

Central utility can aggregate information from multiple vehicles, discarding inconsistent data. This relieves individual vehicles from having to cope with misinformation from malfunctioning sensors in other vehicles.

#2 Everyone Will Behave

Hackers will attack communicationsenabled ITS systems

Central utility can authenticate messages from vehicles, serving as single, easilyauthenticated source of information.

#3 Everyone Will Behave Sensibly

Users may get complacent or overconfident, diminishing the benefit of safety systems

Centralized probe processing may be able to help detect hazards and unsafe behavior in other vehicles and provide alerts.

#4 Nothing Will Change

Vehicle capabilities will evolve

Central utility can manage protocol evolution and handle communication to and from vehicles of any age. Vehicles are largely relieved of the burden of being forward and backward compatible over decades.

This is a genuinely difficult area to address, although good probe processing may help to augment the detection of hazards. In some ways, we might be better off if safety systems were advertised to work only 95 per cent of the time, making clear that the 5 per cent failures would be strictly random – so that staying alert remains a conscious necessity. Please note that we are not actually recommending this approach – it just has a certain sneaky appeal.

Fallacy #4 – Nothing Will Change

“Nothing will change” is the classic fallacy of test systems that look so good that they are promoted to production status without taking into consideration all of the real-world slings and arrows they will be subjected to. These challenges include higher volumes, a wide range of user sophistication (mostly lower than that of the system designers), constant evolution and a generally more demanding environment than in the lab. One example of this fallacy in action is probe data standardization, an area in which we are actively engaged. One of the recurring challenges is to focus system thinking and standards development on the way probe systems will need to work in the real automotive world three-10 years in the future, and not just at this year’s proving ground. Communications strategies that work just fine for a few dozen test vehicles may not work at all, technically or economically, for an environment that includes hundreds of thousands of probe vehicles. Sometimes we are lulled into a false sense of system security by the fact that any particular vehicle and its on-board systems do not tend to change much over time. There may be some improved vehicle control software loaded at the next service visit, but generally a vehicle retains its own identity and capabilities over its lifetime. However, the same cannot be said for this year’s vehicle

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vs. next year’s vehicle. With complete new generations of electronics arising every few years, and software and hardware enhancements arising even more often, the change from year to year can be striking. So let’s look a little into the future and suppose that by 2015 communications-enabled messaging and applications are well and ably launched. Let’s suppose that in 2025, you buy a well-equipped brand new Roadwhizzer GTX Saloon, complete with then-current communications capabilities. Now let’s suppose that it’s 2030 and a fair number of the initial communications-enabled 2015 models will still be cheerfully in service, as will your five-year-old (but still stylish) 2025 Roadwhizzer. As every year went by since 2015, the richness and sophistication of vehicle communications grew in concert with better vehicle sensors (for example, really effective video sensing and interpretation), greater onboard processing power, and other vehicle IT capabilities. Each year, messages from vehicles were able to deliver new and richer data content, potentially in novel formats, and potentially using new protocols and new radio bands. The size, complexity, and frequency of messages have all increased. Here’s what your 2025 Roadwhizzer has to do to stay safe and to help other vehicles stay safe: 1) exchange messages effectively with vehicles that are as much as 10 years older than itself and 2) exchange messages effectively with vehicles that are as much as five years newer than itself. Backward compatibility, within reason, is not too hard – you just restrict the capabilities that you use to those that the older vehicles you’re communicating with can deal with. Forward compatibility, on the other hand, is very difficult to achieve – it’s hard to anticipate all the things that future vehicles will be able to do. We certainly don’t want a particular vehicle limited to reading www.h3bmedia.com

Telematics and processing messages only from the vehicles that are at least as old as it is – a decreasing universe as time goes on – or with a severely limited subset of the useful messages that newer vehicles produce. We also don’t want to limit communications and information exchange to a small frozen set of messages, fixed at the point that this whole process began. In our view, that is a serious misapplication of the standards process. Let us be clear that we are ardent supporters of and participants in ITS standards development. At various times, two of us chaired ITS America’s Standards and Protocols Committee. All of us are involved in ISO/ TC204, the international ITS standards committee. But one of the clear lessons of our standards experience is that the best communications standards are interface and performance standards, not content standards, except when the message set is not subject to much change over time. There can certainly be instances where the message set does stay relatively stable, as in the case of the advanced traveler information systems message set standardized by SAE. Its focus was basic road and traffic information transmitted from a single point: the traffic management center (TMC). Even if there is a major revision of the message set some day in the future, the TMC would not be hard pressed to transmit messages both in pre- and post-revision form. Similarly, a central utility, whose task is to stay current with the messaging capabilities of every equipped vehicle on the road, lets vehicle messaging capabilities

evolve unimpeded. And if the utility is able to send messages out in multiple forms, corresponding to each generation of vehicle on the road, every vehicle will receive all of the messages it can successfully process.

Conclusion

Information technology is safest, most robust, and least costly when its development includes the careful analysis of the real-world situation in which it will be applied. For ITS, this is both true and vital, since ITS is aimed at keeping travelers safe and the transportation system operational. Successful development requires thoroughly thinking through what could go wrong, how the system could be misused (both deliberately and inadvertently), and what is likely to change, especially for ITS applications that will be around for a long time. We suggest that a good near-term approach for many aspects of vehicle communications is the use of a landbased message handling utility that facilitates and accommodates the evolution of communicationsenabled ITS technology. TH Yuka Gomi, Rick Weiland, and Valerie Shuman are respectively President, Senior Vice President and Strategy Director for Ygomi LLC, Oak Brook, IL, USA, which builds and operates companies that use information technology to improve everyday life, such as Connexis LLC, which is working in worldwide partnership with the automotive industry to create the next generation of telematics


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VII

A maximum

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KEVIN AGUIGUI looks at the potential for digital video for surveillance and homeland security purposes and wonders if we’ve come as far as we should have done…

GREG KRUEGER reports from Michigan where much-needed upgrades, combined with some intelligently planned new designs, are revolutionising and revitalising the Detroit area’s ITS network and system.Things are looking up. Literally. The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) is working with HNTB and other consultants to design a VII/ITS (Vehicle Infrastructure Integration/Intelligent Transportation System) system that will transform the State’s ageing ITS network and device infrastructure into a more responsive and robust traffic management system. This wireless communications ITS network is currently being constructed and integrated on I-96, I-94 and I-69 in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties, and Port Huron, Michigan. The design includes a 12-mile VII testbed, closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, Dynamic Message Signs (DMS), vehicle detectors, towers and communications wireless links to extend coverage over 75 miles of interstate, including the approaches to the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron. This project also includes a complete replacement of legacy network equipment, including the transition from analog video

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to digital video. This equipment is nearing end-of-life at approximately 15 years of operations and is becoming more and more of a costly maintenance issue to MDOT. Along with the new roadside equipment, including poles with integrated lowering devices, cameras and vehicle detection, the entire core network contained in five communications hubs will be upgraded from the legacy SONET system to a 10-gigabit native Ethernet system. The project is expected to be completed by spring 2008. The VII portion of this project consists of a 9-mile stretch of I-96 from I-675 to the Livingston County line. HNTB designed the roadside equipment to be installed every third of a mile with a tie-in to the backbone access points once every mile. With the exceptions of the locations that need to communicate to radio aggregation points, most equipment is to be mounted at light pole height. This design will tie into the Michigan Intelligent www.h3bmedia.com

VII

Transportation Systems (MITS) backbone. This stretch of VII testbed will be used as a field operational test.

Tall camera poles improve coverage

The most noticeable element of the project is the towering concrete poles equipped with CCTV cameras that are being installed high above the roadway on a custom lowering device. During an incident on the roadway, information regarding location, severity and traffic queues are crucial to the recovery process. It is in these situations that an unobstructed view and clear image are necessary to facilitate a rapid deployment of emergency personnel, thus tending to those affected and quickly clearing the roadway and returning traffic to a normal flow. The camera poles for this project are spun concrete with a density of 8,000 to 10,000 psi to impede the absorption and migration of water. The poles are crewww.h3bmedia.com

ated with a centrifugal process that starts with a “cage” or frame, consisting of a cylinder of high strength steel strands. The frame is laid lengthwise inside of a mould. High density concrete is dispensed into the mould and roughly packed on the frame. The mould is locked into place and then spun at a high rate of speed, sending the concrete to the sides while filling all voids around the frame. The steel of the cage is stressed by pulling on it. The spun concrete forms a hollow pole and is cured by sending low-pressure steam through the center. The tension is then removed from the steel. The poles will be 90 feet tall from the ground to the top, with another 15 feet direct-buried in the ground. A concrete skirt poured around the pole base creates additional stability to the pole. This direct burial is another cost saver for the project, as it eliminates the need for an anchor system, making for quicker and easier installation. Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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VII

“The biggest lesson we have learned in past Michigan roadway projects is that power drops are a major expense” There are a number of reasons that HNTB decided to use higher poles for this project. The first is the reduction of possible occlusion both by existing structures and roadway vegetation and the occlusion created by taller vehicles traveling in the closer lane to the camera. By using taller poles for the project, the camera can obtain a wider field of view as well as see over tall objects.The height also allows for a picture that excludes the horizon and any glare that may come from it. The detection of gapping, the space between the front of one vehicle and the rear of the next, is also more visible with camera height. Added height also factors into the number of poles needed to cover an area. With the extended field of view, cameras can be placed further apart, condensing the number of poles needed. This particular project requires 34 90-foot high poles, while the required number of shorter poles, typically 40 feet tall, would necessitate approximately 50 poles to cover the same area. That’s 16 more poles, 16 more cameras and tellingly, 16 more sites. Installing the much higher poles reduces both up-front and maintenance costs.

Fewer poles realize maintenance savings

Fewer poles also require fewer power drops. Says David Jones, the deputy project manager for this project: “The biggest lesson we have learned in past Michigan roadway projects is that power drops are a major expense in Michigan and are almost always underestimated.” He goes on to explain that the cost savings for fewer power drops and fewer poles required for complete visual cov-

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erage more than make up for the use of the taller and more expensive poles. Maintenance of the cameras is made quicker, easier and safer with the use of camera lowering devices. After a thorough research and bidding process, MDOT approved the contractor’s choice of a camera lowering device from MG Squared (MG2). The dome cameras are mounted with a pulley system installed on this device which when operated disconnects the power and signal to the camera and then lowers only the camera to the ground via a single stainless steel aircraft cable. The custom pole/lowering device combination allows the cameras to be maintained at ground level thereby eliminating the need for bucket trucks, lane closures, and dangerous work zones. In projects without a lowering device, the use of bucket trucks creates the need for Maintenance of Traffic (MOT) even if only the shoulder is being closed. Camera lowering devices are very popular with State DOTs due to the added coverage the higher mounting height yields and the lack of MOT required during the maintenance of the cameras. Says MG2’s Martin Maners III: “It is evident that the team at HNTB and Michigan DOT appreciated the long term cost of ownership associated with such a large CCTV deployment. These guys really did their homework in preparing this project. If the DOT has to shut down lanes of traffic or even shoulders to maintain these cameras that are intended to improve traffic flow, it is like shooting yourself in the foot. Generally,“ he continues,“any DOT is constrained with regards to when mainwww.h3bmedia.com

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“While we developed this technology for the US market. it is now being used throughout the world” tenance of cameras may take place due to traffic concerns. However, the implementation of the lowering device removes these constraints enabling them to simply clean a lens or replace an entire camera any time day or night - even during rush hour with only one man and a portable lowering tool. The use of a lowering device simply equates to an overall increase in the efficiency of these cameras. “While we developed this camera lowering technology for the US transport marketplace, it is now being used throughout the world in both transport and highend security applications.”

Camera selection key to picture quality

The cameras selected by the contractor for the project are American Dynamics SpeedDome Ultra VII Day/ Night programmable dome cameras with electronic image stabilization (EIS). Stabilization was an important factor in the decision to use these cameras. Although they are quite stable, the height of the poles does allow for a certain amount of movement. The movement of the camera itself is another concern, as high winds are not uncommon in Michigan, a condition that will undoubtedly affect the equipment. The EIS system retains image resolution by reducing the vibration of the image. The cameras also feature a 230x total zoom; 23x optical and 10x digital. SpeedDome cameras support the NTCIP protocol, allowing the cameras to be integrated into any future system used in the area, including apparatus from different manufacturers. www.h3bmedia.com

Ultimately, the decision to use the cameras was based on the manufacturer’s research and development that had gone into using the SpeedDome cameras in conjunction with lowering systems. These cameras are also closed at the top and sealed, preventing weather and moisture related malfunctions, an absolute necessity for the unpredictable and sometimes harsh Michigan weather.

Value of wireless

This project will utilize wireless technology for communication between instruments. The data cables inside the poles allow for the transfer of video information to the ITS Cabinet at the base of the pole, which encodes the video to an MPEG4 format before it is wirelessly transmitted to the network. The line-of-sight for wireless devices is clear when mounted above traffic and other physical barriers. Using wireless devices also saves the cost of installing fiber optic cable into and between the device sites. The wireless antennae installed for the cameras are a point-to-multipoint link, directing the information to five communication towers. The towers wirelessly communicate via a point-to-point link to the MDOT hubs and then the network. TH Greg Krueger is MDOT’s ITS program manager. The project is being constructed by Posen Electric and integrated by PB/Telvent. Questions about the project should be directed to David Jones at HNTB Michigan: [email protected] Thinking Highways Vol 2 No 1

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Traveler Information Systems are moving!

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Enabling agencies to improve financial efficiency for traveler information systems, and improve data quality and reliability to commercial levels, literally in a matter of days.

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