| The Mode Warrior
by Greg Winfree
“The need for data
exchange won’t stop
at the city limits”
www.TrafficTechnologyToday.com 047
Connected mobility must
benefit rural roads, too
We tend to think
of transportation in
opposing terms: freight
versus passenger vehicles; rail versus road;
urban versus rural. It’s understandable why,
since it lets us chop up the pie of improving
and innovating our transportation system
into digestible pieces. But it can put
stakeholders in competition for limited
resources. The integrated nature of
tomorrow’s network will necessarily
require a different approach.
November/December 2019 Traffic Technology International
The growth of mega-regions—
where urban boundaries meld with
rural communities as cities grow closer
together—is one example. The Texas
Triangle, connecting Houston, Dallas/Fort
Worth, and Austin/San Antonio is one such
mega-region. Nighttime satellite photos
of the Triangle, reveal how the rural areas
between the cities are developing quickly
to accommodate growth.
In the future every stop, every road,
every traffic signal will be connected via
constant communication. Cars will share
data with other vehicles and even the
traffic signal itself. Bumper-to-bumper
traffic on the way to work? No worries!
Your car will automatically reroute you.
The need for reliable, secure data
exchange, however, won’t stop at the
city limits. Improving rural infrastructure
must happen alongside urban upgrades.
Remember, tomorrow’s transportation
network is more than a series of connected
interstates, state highways, and county
roads; it’s also a single, unified
transportation platform for information
exchange that exists online.
When it comes to implementing
advanced technology, the agricultural
sector is ahead of the curve. Only now
being pilot tested on our roadways,
Level 3 vehicles (automated, but with
human oversight/control) are already on
state of the art farms.
As driving environments go, crop rows
are a bit simpler than our daily commutes,
whether in the city or the country. So, safely,
reliably ushering in tomorrow’s integrated
transportation network requires significant
research, testing, and policy planning. For
example, at the Texas A&M Transportation
Institute (TTI), we’re studying how roads
can alert maintenance personnel before
the asphalt fails and creates a pothole. We’re
looking at how flood sensors can predict
when a roadway will be washed out and
how machine learning can augment
human oversight in a traffic management
center. Underlying that research is the idea
that improving communication — reported
by the infrastructure itself, evaluated
through data analysis, then sent on as
recommendations to first responders and
the traveling public — can increase mobility,
improve operational efficiencies and, most
importantly, protect human life.
To get there, though, we have to
reevaluate our assumptions about how
the network we’ve built should work. The
bottom line is this — an unprecedented
level of data dependence and automation
is coming to our transportation system.
Paralleling the physical network of road, rail,
and air traffic is the invisible but no less vital
data exchange that will happen via the
Internet of Things. And the rural
connections along that network must be
as resilient, reliable and sustainable as their
urban analogs. Otherwise, we might find
ourselves stranded on a country road
missing more than just a cell phone signal.
Gregory D Winfree is director of the
Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI)
Conclusion
While the frequency of
pedestrian-vehicle conflicts
reduced, the average speed
of vehicles making turning
movements increased by
approximately 4 mph, due to the
fact that the pedestrian scramble
removed pedestrians on the
south leg crosswalk during the
vehicle phase, so the right and
left- turning vehicles were
essentially free-flowing.
In addition, the percentage
of potential conflicts where
the pedestrian arrived at the
potential conflict point first,
decreased from 57% to 30%
(approximately 47% reduction)
of the total potential conflicts.
Overall, the analysis showed
a 75% performance improvement
in near collisions between
vehicles and pedestrians with
the implementation of the
pedestrian scramble, resulting
in a safety improvement. It also
provided the safety engineers
with insight for introducing
further modifications to reduce
vehicle speed. Overall, the
project implementation team
was very satisfied with this
quick and effective way of
evaluating and validating before
and after pedestrian safetyfocused
countermeasures.
1 Global status report on road
safety 2018. Geneva: World Health
Organization; 2018. Licence: CC
BYNC-SA 3.0 IGO
2 Start, Mark Midtown Atlanta
Case Study-New Data Collection
Techniques in Automated
Pedestrian Safety Analysis.
Retrieved July 08, 2019
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