Transportation, Technology, and Academic Leaders Urge Congress to Advance Innovation and Technology Solutions in Transportation Bill

Public and Private Sector Leaders Call for Deployment of Intelligent Systems and Technologies that will Create a Safer, Cleaner, more Efficient, and more Financially Sustainable Transportation System

• Incentivize Performance Improvements by linking transportation funding to specific, aggressive performance goals in areas such as traffic-related fatalities, traffic congestion, and travel times. The U.S. DOT should incentivize state and local agencies to achieve or exceed national goals, and should create a National Scorecard to publish data on performance results and improvements. In addition, a cost-benefit analysis of ITS solutions and operational strategies should be performed by agencies as part of their annual and long-range statewide and regional plans.
• Put Smart Technologies to Work by providing public agencies and private sector partners with the tools to manage and improve the performance of their intermodal transportation systems. The coalition is supporting a proposal by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials to allocate $3 billion per year for an Operations and Management program, and is urging Congress to dedicate at least $1 billion of this amount for deployment and intermodal integration of ITS to improve safety, reduce congestion, minimize emissions and facilitate mode choice, improve productivity, and optimize multimodal capacity, efficiency, and system performance. In addition, ITS and systems operations and management solutions should be encouraged as part of any congestion reduction, metropolitan mobility, air quality and climate change, safety, freight, transit, or other targeted initiatives.
• Create Smart Towns and City Streets in which cars help prevent crashes, where rush hour is a thing of the past, and where vehicles have wireless connectivity to an infinite range of traveler services from real-time traffic, transit and parking information to collision avoidance systems and even the ability to reschedule a bus, train or plane ticket from a cell phone or navigational device. As a first step in reaching this goal, the transportation bill should create a competitive selection process to designate several "smart" cities, towns, and communities to serve as model deployment sites for wireless safety, mobility and environmental solutions. Selected sites could also provide venues for real-world demonstrations of a mileage-based user fee system and other innovative financing strategies.
• Advance Next Generation Innovations by providing $250 million annually for the Federal ITS research program in order to advance next generation innovations in areas such as vehicle and intersection collision avoidance, congestion management, environmental solutions, emergency response, innovative financing, and other ITS-enabled solutions.