Imagine that transit and truck drivers receive regular updates, allowing them to stay on schedule -- and stay in business.

For commercial passenger buses and freight carriers, time is money. Indeed, the ability to stay on schedule and deliver passengers or cargo on time not only drives customer satisfaction but also helps increase the operational efficiency of a business. In many cases, it could be the very difference between a company’s success or failure.

Soon, robust new technologies for monitoring traffic speed, weather conditions, and road incidents will provide data that can be sent via existing wireless networks and smart phones to state and local travel information lines (such as 511). The technologies will enable both drivers and dispatchers to know the traffic and weather conditions on stretches of road ahead of time so that they can make tactical decisions about possible route changes. To provide that capability, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Dynamic Mobility Applications (DMA) research program is currently exploring innovative ways to link transportation information and information technology. The goal is to give vehicle operators with powerful new tools for managing their transportation and mobility choices.

Imagine that your car warns you when you're approaching a work zone, thus calling your attention to construction, maintenance, and law enforcement workers in that area.

Over the past decade, work-zone fatalities have increased nationwide by nearly 50 percent. In 2006 alone, more than one thousand workers and motorists were killed in work zones. Road construction and utility workers, as well as police officers on traffic detail, are at risk of injury and death when drivers do not respond in time to work-zone conditions by slowing down and by reacting in time to lane changes, rough road surfaces, and other temporary alterations to their route.

To help prevent such accidents, new wireless traffic safety systems will provide essential, up-to-the-minute information about road conditions ahead, including the presence of work zones. Drivers will receive timely information about speed-limit reductions, projected travel times, and alternative route options. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s V2I Communications for Safety research program is exploring the wireless exchange of critical safety and operational data between vehicles and the highway infrastructure. The primary goal is to reduce vehicle crashes, while also enabling a wide range of other safety, mobility, and environmental benefits.

Imagine that a car two miles ahead of you on the highway sends an alert to your vehicle, warning you of upcoming slippery conditions causing drivers to slam on their brakes.

Last August, a flash thunderstorm in Arizona caused a massive pile-up of almost 70 vehicles that sent seven people to the hospital and tied up traffic for hours. Every year, thousands of people are injured or killed in accidents on our nation’s highways because of bad weather and poor road conditions. And the consequences go beyond those human costs to include lost productivity to commercial motor vehicle operators and the expense to local governments responsible for clearing accidents and repairing damaged roadways, to say nothing of the inconvenience to motorists.

Soon, innovative new wireless technologies will allow cars to share important safety data with one another. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Communications for Safety research program is developing technologies that will enable vehicles to exchange basic safety messages that provide a 360-degree locational awareness. When combined with safety applications, these technologies will help prevent accidents and save lives by allowing vehicles to communicate data about forceful brake application, blind spots, and lane merge intentions.

Imagine that you can make "green" transportation choices based on real-world data.

Every weekday, commuters make decisions about how to get from home to work, and from work to the supermarket, school, day care, and then back home. The choices they make affect roadway congestion and air quality at the neighborhood, city, and metropolitan level. In the United States alone, traffic congestion incurs a total annual cost of $78 billion, which includes an estimated 4.2 billion hours in excess travel time and an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel burned. And the environmental costs are considerable – vehicles idling in traffic cause substantially more air pollution that if they were moving at optimal speeds.

In the near future, data generated from technology within connected vehicles will be combined with existing ITS to give traffic managers detailed and accurate multi-dimensional real-time information about emissions, air quality conditions, traffic flow, fuel consumption, and vehicle speeds along defined stretches of roads and highways. Taking into account work and school zones, the traffic managers will then be able to develop an integrated corridor strategy, adjusting signal cycles with up-to-the-minute data. The goal is to balance and optimize environmental concerns against mobility needs, and to inform travelers of the environmental impact and the greenest options so that they can make informed travel decisions. The "green" result will be cleaner air, shorter travel times, and decreased fuel consumption. Within the U.S. Department of Transportation’s multimodal research program, a key technology is AERIS (Applications for the Environment: Real-Time Information Synthesis). It captures, synthesizes, and communicates real-time information between vehicles and the infrastructure. The system also incorporates environmental data from sensors along roadways to enable better transportation decisions that result in improved air quality.