The United States Department of Transportation has initiated a Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment effort. The USDOT will seek partnerships among State and local transportation agencies, commercial vehicle operators, private companies, and other stakeholders. Teams will select and deploy appropriate connected vehicle solutions from across all elements of surface transportation (including transit, freeway operations, arterial operations, parking facilities, toll ways, and ports). These solutions will address local transportation issues and related performance goals.
Teams will be invited to submit cooperative pilot proposals for funding and support of pilot deployments. The pilot s will produce operational deployments that will harness the capabilities of mobile connectivity and wireless technologies to provide safety, mobility, and environmental benefits.
Now I want to outline one conceptual scenario, Greypool County, a rural county in Southwest U.S.
Greypool County faces a variety of surface transportation challenges. As a rural county in the Southwest, summer conditions are extreme and wildly variable. Incident response times are often quite lengthy. Road weather information collection and transit options are limited, and the county is prone to severe accidents involving high speeds and left turn violations at intersections. Local stakeholders resolve to improve these conditions
Local stakeholders convened to discuss their key transportation challenges within Greypool County, and agreed with the items on this slide.
With regard to intersection safety, at many rural intersections, poor sight lines and high speeds on the mainline often result is drivers misjudging gaps when departing from stop signs. Red light running violations are also prevalent at signalized intersections. The resulting collisions at these intersections, involving a vehicle turning left across path, often result in fatal and serious injury crashes.
For accessibility, the existing fixed route transit options do not serve the majority of the destinations in the county, and transit stops are not always accessible to travelers. As a result, travelers often experience long wait times.
The unpredictable summer weather (e.g., lightning storms, dust storms) often cause delays and impact safety due to inadequate road weather information dissemination. There are limited deployed devices in the field to collect road weather information, and limited mechanisms to disseminated proactive road weather information to drivers.
After analyzing their key transportation issues, the Greypool County stakeholders have identified their desired improvements. They aim to reduce crashes by 10%, injuries by 20%, and fatalities by 30%. They also seek to reduce transit wait times by 20%, expand transit options, and increase road weather data collection and the availability of this information to drivers.
This is the full catalog of USDOT applications that are designed to address safety, mobility, and environmental concerns. Based on the needs assessment and desired improvements, the stakeholders will select applications to achieve their targets.
To improve safety, they select the Red Light Violation Warning and the Stop Sign Gap Assist vehicle-to-infrastructure safety applications, and the Left Turn Assist (LTA) vehicle-to-vehicle safety application.
To increase accessibility, they have selected the Dynamic Transit Operations (T-DISP) mobility application.
And to better manage weather events, the stakeholders have selected the Weather Response Traffic Information (WxTINFO) road weather application.
Here is an overview of the five applications selected by the stakeholders to improve safety, increase accessibility, and better manage weather events in Greypool County. If properly executed, these applications will provide the desired benefits and act synergistically to improve the overall performance of the surface transportation network.
This slide illustrates the effects of the Stop Sign Gap Assist application when deployed in Greypool County. Positive impacts include a significant reduction in crashes, injuries, and fatalities at intersections and a 30% reduction of congestion resulting from non-recurring traffic incidents.
Here is an illustration of the deployment of the Dynamic Transit Operations (T-DISP) application. Total mobility benefits include increased transit accessibility, a 15% reduction in transit wait times at stops, an 8% increase in transit ridership, and a 20% reduction in transit operating costs by switching to dynamic transit operations.
The deployment of the Weather Response Traffic Information (WxTINFO) application results in several benefits for Greypool County. By using county and private vehicles as data-collecting probes, the county will benefit from reduced weather-related delays and incidents due to an increase in real-time information. Travelers are provided the ability to access this information to adjust their travel plans in response to weather conditions.
Our final slide illustrates the fully integrated deployment of Greypool County’s Connected Vehicle applications. Dynamic transit services provide flexibility and quality service for transit customers. Crashes and resultant injuries have declined at rural intersections. And innovative road weather technology deployment allows drivers to view local road weather conditions and plan accordingly.
