Cars collect troves of data about traffic and road hazards. Do they have to share?

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The secret to avoiding red lights during rush hour in Utah’s largest city may be as simple as following the bus.

Transportation officials have spent the past few years refining a system in which radio transmitters on commuter buses talk directly to traffic signals in the Salt Lake City area, asking for a few extra seconds of green as they approach.

Congestion on these so-called smart roads already seems to be smoother, but it’s just a small preview of the high-tech upgrades coming to Utah’s roads and eventually the US.

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Supported by a federal grant of $ 20 million and an ambitious call to “Connect the West,” the goal is to ensure that every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can finally communicate with each other and roadside infrastructure about congestion, accidents. , road hazards and weather conditions.

With this knowledge, drivers can immediately know when to take another route, bypassing the need for humans to manually send signs to electronic road signs or mapping apps found on mobile phones.

“Vehicles can tell you a lot about what’s happening on the road,” said Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer at the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe the brakes are bad, or the windshield wipers, or the wheels are jumping. The car is anonymously broadcasting that data 10 times a second, giving you constant information.

When cars transmit information in real time to other cars and various sensors are installed over the road, the technology is widely known as vehicle-to-everything, or V2X. Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled a national blueprint for how state and local governments and private companies should implement the various V2X projects already underway to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

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The overall goal is universal: limit road deaths and serious injuries, which have recently risen to historic levels.

A 2016 analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded V2X could help. Implementing just the two earliest vehicle-for-all apps nationwide would prevent 439,000 to 615,000 accidents and save 987 to 1,366 lives, the research found.

Dan Langenkamp has been lobbying for road safety improvements since his wife Sarah Langenkamp, ​​a US diplomat, was killed by a truck while cycling in Maryland in 2022. Joining officials at a press conference announcing the vehicle-for-all blueprint, Langenkamp called on governments around the world to . US to roll out the technology as widely and quickly as possible.

“How can we as government officials, as manufacturers, and as Americans not push this technology too quickly, knowing that we have the power to save ourselves from this disaster, the crisis on our way,” he said.

Most of the public resistance is about privacy. Although V2X’s launch plan is committed to protecting personal information, some privacy advocates remain skeptical.

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Critics say the system can’t track specific vehicles, but it can gather enough identifying characteristics — even things like innocuous tire pressure levels — that it doesn’t take much work to figure out who’s behind the wheel and where. going.

“Once you get enough unique information, you can reasonably say that the car driving on this road at this time that has a certain weight class is probably the mayor,” said Cliff Braun, director of technology, policy and research for Electronics. Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital privacy.

The federal blueprint says the nation’s top 75 metropolitan areas should aspire to have at least 25% of signalized intersections equipped with the technology by 2028, along with higher milestones in subsequent years. With a quick start, the Salt Lake City area has surpassed 20%.

Of course, upgrading the signal is the easy part. The most important data comes from the car itself. While most of the new ones have connected features, they don’t all work the same way.

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Before launching the “Connect the West” plan, Utah officials are testing what they call the state’s first radio-based connected vehicle technology, using only data provided by fleet vehicles such as buses and snow plows. One early pilot program updated bus routes on a busy stretch of Redwood Road, and it’s not just bus riders who have noticed a difference.

“Whatever is done will be done,” said Jenny Duenas, assistant director of nearby Panda Child Care, where 80 children ages 6 weeks to 12 years are enrolled. “We haven’t seen traffic in a long time. We have to get the kids out of here, so the more freedom we have, the easier it is to get out of the orphanage.

Casey Brock, bus communications supervisor for the Utah Transit Authority, said most of the changes may not be visible to drivers. However, even shaving a few seconds off a bus route can dramatically reduce congestion while increasing safety, he said.

“From a commuter’s point of view, it might be, ‘Oh, I’ve got good traffic,'” Brock said. “They don’t have to understand all the mechanisms behind the scenes.”

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This summer, Michigan unveiled a 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) stretch of connected and automated vehicle corridor planned for Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The pilot project has a digital infrastructure, including sensors and cameras installed at posts along the highway, which will help drivers prepare for traffic jams by sending notifications about things like debris and stuck vehicles.

The same technology is being used for a smart freight corridor around Austin, Texas, which aims to inform truckers about road conditions and eventually cater to self-driving trucks.

Darran Anderson, director of strategy and innovation at the Texas Department of Transportation, said officials hope technology not only boosts the state’s massive freight industry but also helps reverse a troubling trend that has spanned more than twenty years. The last day without a traffic fatality in Texas was November 7, 2000.

Cavnue, the Washington, DC subsidiary of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Infrastructure partner, funded the Michigan project and was awarded the contract to develop it in Texas. The company has set its sights on becoming an industry leader in smart road technology.

Chris Armstrong, Cavnue’s vice president of products, calls V2X “a digital seat belt for cars” but says it can only work if cars and roadside infrastructure can communicate seamlessly.

“Instead of speaking 50 different languages, overnight we want everyone to speak the same language,” he said.

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