ITS America’s president and CEO, Shailen Bhatt, outlined key benefits of ITS 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 new best practices report, which will include information from cites, states, metropolitan planning organizations (MPO), research universities, and private sector organizations, across the country.
The new report will provide a detailed body of data on intelligent transportation technology deployment, which ITS America will use to inform both Congress and the US Administration on the need to prioritize intelligent transportation technologies in the reauthorization of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Bhatt provided a preview of the new report at the congressional hearing.
Bhatt shared information on the following projects:
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 of California;
Smart 25 Pilot in Colorado, 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 preplan 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;
Nevada’s self-driving shuttle that operates in mixed traffic on a half-mile loop in Las Vegas. A public-private partnership, it is the country’s first autonomous bus to be fully integrated with smart city infrastructure.
“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 at the hearing. “We are on the cusp of a technology revolution that will transform communities large and small. 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.”
