ITS America Details Projects That Improve Safety; Mobility at House Hearing

WASHINGTON – Transportation agencies across the country are using intelligent transportation technologies to save lives, improve mobility, extend the life of infrastructure, and increase sustainability, and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) highlighted a number of those technologies at a congressional hearing today.

ITS America President and CEO Shailen Bhatt outlined key benefits of projects in California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan and Nevada at the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit’s hearing on Innovation in Surface Transportation. ITS America is cataloging these and other projects in a best practices report, which will include information from cites, states, MPOs, research universities and private sector organizations across the country. It will provide a detailed body of data on intelligent transportation technology deployment, which ITS America will use to inform Congress and the Administration on the need to prioritize intelligent transportation technologies in the reauthorization of the FAST Act. Bhatt provided a preview of the report at today’s hearing.

“We are in the midst of a technology revolution, and this transformation can substantially improve the safety and operations of our nation’s transportation system,” Bhatt said.

Bhatt shared information on the following projects (more details available in his written testimony):

• Bay Bridge Forward, which uses multiple projects to move more people in fewer vehicles through the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge Corridor, the most congested travel corridor in the nine-county Bay Area region;
• Smart 25 Pilot, a management system that addresses recurring peak-period congestion along the critical I-25 corridor,which connects Denver’s central business district and the Southeast Denver business corridor;
• Truck Parking Availability System, which provides real-time parking availability information in Florida so truckers can make decisions that will save time and allows dispatchers to pre-plan the trips – saving an average of 30 minutes of driving time for most truck drivers;
• US-23 Flex Route, which uses real‐time data to open the shoulder, harmonize speeds, warn drivers of conditions ahead and respond to incidents on the freeway between Brighton and Ann Arbor, Michigan – the most congested corridor in the state outside of metropolitan Detroit; and
• Las Vegas self-driving shuttle that operates in mixed traffic on a half-mile loop. A public-private partnership, it is the country’s first autonomous bus to be fully integrated with smart city infrastructure.

“We are on the cusp of a technology revolution that will transform communities large and small,” Bhatt said. “Just as infrastructure was critical to the development of our economy in the 20th century, maintenance of existing infrastructure and deployment of smart infrastructure will be critical for our global competitiveness as this century moves forward,” Bhatt said.

Contact: Cathy St. Denis, cstdenis@itsa.org

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About ITS America: The Intelligent Transportation Society of America advances the research and deployment of intelligent transportation technologies to save lives, improve mobility, promote sustainability, and increase efficiency and productivity. Our vision is a better future transformed by intelligent mobility: safer, greener, smarter. For more information, please visit www.itsa.org