Transportation officials are hoping a major investment in a technology allowing cars to talk to other cars about hazards on the road could be part of the solution to a recent surge in traffic deaths
The secret to avoiding red lights during rush hour in Utah’s largest city might be as simple as following a bus.
Transportation officials have spent the past few years refining a system in which radio transmitters inside commuter buses talk directly to the traffic signals in the Salt Lake City area, requesting a few extra seconds of green when they approach.
Congestion on these so-called smart streets is already noticeably smoother, but it’s just a small preview of the high-tech upgrades that could be coming soon to roads across Utah and ultimately across the U.S.
Buoyed by a $20 million federal grant and an ambitious calling to “Connect the West,” the goal is to ensure every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can eventually communicate with one another and the roadside infrastructure about congestion, accidents, road hazards and weather conditions.
With that knowledge, drivers can instantly know they should take another route, bypassing the need for a human to manually send an alert to an electronic street sign or the mapping apps found on cellphones.
“A vehicle can tell us a lot about what’s going on in the roadway,” said Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer at the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe it braked really hard, or the windshield wipers are on, or the wheels are slipping. The car anonymously broadcasts to us that blip of data 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”
When cars transmit information in real time to other cars and the various sensors posted along and above the road, the technology is known broadly 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 deploy the various V2X projects already in the works to make sure everyone is on the same page.
The overarching objective is universal: dramatically curb roadway deaths and serious injuries, which have recently spiked to historic levels.
A 2016 analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded V2X could help.
