Cars that communicate with each other could help reduce fatal crashes on U.S. roads

The secret to avoiding rush-hour red lights 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 communicate directly with traffic lights in the Salt Lake City area, requesting a few extra seconds of green light as they approach.

Congestion on these so-called smart streets is already noticeably smoother, but that’s just a small taste of the high-tech improvements that could soon hit roads in Utah and, eventually, across the United States.

Backed by a $20 million federal grant and an ambitious goal to “connect the West,” the aim is to ensure that every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can eventually communicate with each other and with highway infrastructure about traffic congestion, accidents, road hazards and weather conditions.

With this knowledge, drivers can instantly know that they need to take an alternate route, avoiding the need for a human to manually send an alert to an electronic road sign or mobile phone mapping apps.

“A vehicle can tell us a lot about what’s happening on the road,” says Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation. “It might be braking really hard, the wipers are on, or the wheels are spinning. The car is anonymously transmitting that data to us 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”

When cars transmit real-time information to other cars and to various sensors placed along and above the road, the technology is known as “vehicle-to-everything,” or V2X. Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled a national plan for how state and local governments and private companies should roll out the various V2X projects already underway to ensure everyone is on the same page.

The overarching goal is universal: to significantly reduce the number of road deaths and serious injuries, which have recently reached historic levels.

A 2016 analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that V2X could help. Implementing two of the first vehicle-to-everything apps nationwide would prevent 439,000 to 615,000 crashes and save 987 to 1,366 lives, its research found.

Dan Langenkamp has been advocating for improved road safety since his wife Sarah Langenkamp, ​​a U.S. diplomat, was killed by a truck while cycling in Maryland in 2022. Joining officials at the news conference announcing the vehicle-to-everything project, Langenkamp urged U.S. governments to deploy the technology as widely and as quickly as possible.

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

Public resistance is largely about privacy. While the V2X deployment plan pledges to protect personal information, some privacy advocates remain skeptical.

Critics say that while the system can’t track specific vehicles, it can compile enough identifying characteristics — even something as innocuous as tire pressure levels — that it doesn’t take too much work to figure out who’s behind the wheel and where they’re going.

“Once you have enough unique information, you can reasonably say that the car that’s driving down this street at this time and that has this particular weight class probably belongs to the mayor,” said Cliff Braun, associate director of technology, policy and research for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital privacy.

The federal blueprint calls for the nation’s 75 largest metropolitan areas to aim to have at least 25 percent of their signalized intersections equipped with the technology by 2028, with more ambitious goals in subsequent years. Thanks to its rapid start, the Salt Lake City region has already surpassed 20 percent.

Of course, upgrading the signals is the easy part. The most important data comes from the cars themselves. While most new cars have connected features, they don’t all work the same way.

Before launching the Connect the West project, Utah officials tested what they call the nation’s first radio-connected vehicle technology, using only data from fleet vehicles, such as buses and snowplows. One of the first pilot programs modernized the bus route on a busy stretch of Redwood Road, and bus riders weren’t the only ones who noticed a difference.

“Everything they do works,” said Jenny Duenas, assistant director of nearby Panda Child Care, which enrolls 80 children ages 6 weeks to 12 years. “We haven’t seen any traffic in a while. We have to transport our kids out of here, so when there’s a lot more traffic, it’s a lot easier to get out of the daycare.”

Casey Brock, bus communications manager for the Utah Transit Authority, said most of the changes may not be noticeable to drivers. However, even a few seconds off a bus route can significantly reduce congestion while improving safety, he said.

“From the riders’ perspective, it can be, ‘Oh, I had a good day of traffic,’” Brock said. “They don’t need to know all the mechanics that go on behind the scenes.”

This summer, Michigan broke ground on a 3-mile stretch of connected and automated vehicle corridor planned for Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The pilot project includes digital infrastructure, including sensors and cameras installed on poles along the highway, that will help drivers prepare for traffic delays by sending notifications about things like debris and disabled vehicles.

Similar technology is being used for a smart freight corridor around Austin, Texas, that aims to inform truck drivers about road conditions and eventually accommodate the needs of autonomous trucks.

Darran Anderson, director of strategy and innovation for the Texas Department of Transportation, said officials hope the technology will not only boost the state’s freight industry, but also reverse a troubling trend that has lasted for more than two decades. The last day without a traffic fatality in Texas was Nov. 7, 2000.

Cavnue, a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, funded the Michigan project and was awarded a contract to develop the Texas project. The company aims to become an industry leader in smart road technology.

Chris Armstrong, vice president of products at Cavnue, calls V2X “a digital seatbelt for the car,” but says it only works if cars and road infrastructure can communicate seamlessly with each other.

“Instead of speaking 50 different languages, overnight we would all like to speak the same language,” he said.

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