Cross-cutting Issues

The Rural Safety Innovation Program (RSIP) is one of several key programs under the
U.S. DOT’s Rural Safety Initiative. In 2008, twelve RSIP grants were awarded to state and
county DOTs across the country to deploy ITS technologies in rural areas of their
jurisdictions in an attempt to improve safety in these areas. Per the requirements of the
grants, recipients agreed to participate in an independent evaluation of their deployments.
This evaluation involves determining the effectiveness of the specific technologies being
deployed, conducting a qualitative assessment of the deployment experience of the grantees to facilitate a “lessons learned” discussion, and assessing the specific impact of the deployed ITS components in improving safety. Stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions, traveler
intercept surveys, field data collection of vehicle speed data, and review of maintenance logs
are some of the methods being used to gather evaluation data. This presentation will
summarize the lessons learned from each of the projects and discuss the suitability of the
projects for deployment elsewhere in the future.

Author: Alan Pate

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

The emergence of the smartphone as a powerful mobile computing platform has resulted in the tremendous growth of user services. This paper describes a smartphone-integrated vehicle platform that utilizes vehicle-to-vehicle/infrastructure/pedestrian (broadly V2X) communication to provide a variety of traveler information and infotainment services. The system and underlying architecture enables a smartphone to host a variety of applications and seamlessly integrate with vehicle services. This approach facilitates the deployment of new services without changes to the vehicle architecture. A variety of applications were developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the system.

Author: Donald K. Grimm

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

The objective of this investigation is to assess how historical data performs relative to real-time data when compared to ground-truth speed. The motivation for the analysis is two-fold. Within the I-95 Corridor Coalition’s Vehicle Probe Project (VPP) historical data is used whenever there is insufficient real-time data to report current traffic conditions. In this case, the degree to which historical data is a reliable estimate of real-time conditions is of interest. The second motivation is to evaluate the ability of the validation methodology to distinguish between historical data as opposed to a real-time data during recurring and non-recurring congestion. Using the VPP validation methodology in which performance is segregated by four speed ranges; historical data is scored using the validation methodology and compared to the validation results of actual VPP real-time data. All data for this investigation was taken from the VPP validation program in which ground truth data is sampled using Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring (BTM) technology.

Authors: Elham Sharifi, Stanley E. Young Ph.D. PE

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

The use of Media Access Control (MAC) Readers for travel time data collection provides relatively accurate and inexpensive way to collect travel time data. In spite of availability of of-the-shelf commercial MAC Readers many research institutions are developing and testing their own devices, mostly for research purposes. This study presents and evaluates such a research-driven MAC Reader developed at Florida Atlantic University.  The study investigates the impact of multiple factors that could possibly affect the readings from MAC Readers such as location of the Bluetooth devices within vehicle, approaching speed of vehicles with Bluetooth devices, location of the MAC Readers with respect to position of the intersection, and the type of antennae. The results indicate that MAC Readers resemble travel times which are collected by other methods in arterial networks. Other findings show that Bluetooth devices placed in the vehicle’s dashboard are detected more easily than those placed in the driver’s pocket; vehicles traveling at lower speeds are detected more reliably than fast-moving cars; and Omni-directional antenna was more successful in detecting than a unidirectional antenna.

Authors: Aleksandar Stevanovic, Ph.D., P.E., Claudia L. Olarte, Alvaro Galletebeitia, Borja Galletebeitia, Evangelos I. Kaisar, Ph.D.

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

The State of Florida initiated a program in October 2003 to develop a software system
(known as SunGuide®) that is deployed in multiple Traffic Management Centers (TMCs)
including major metropolitan and smaller city/county deployments. Each of these TMCs
manages traffic and events using video cameras, Dynamic Message Signs (DMSs), detectors,
Highway Advisory Radios (HARs), managed lanes (with dynamic pricing) and Road Rangers
(vehicles that are deployed to assist motorists and to assist in managing events). The centers
are connected via a Center-to-Center (C2C) interface so that they may exchange status data
and issue commands to control equipment. SunGuide® was designed and implemented to
facilitate the managing of events and distribution of information to travelers. The generation
of performance measure reports is automated so that reports are standardized across the state. A key feature of the software is that new modules can be developed quickly to meet new user needs; for example, for the ITS World Congress to be held in October 2011 it was decided to add Connected VehicleSM capability to the system so that applications could be developed to showcase the Connected Vehicle functionality in the urban area surrounding the conference venue. This paper describes the system design, implementation, and lessons learned from the development of the Connected Vehicle component of the SunGuide system.

Authors: Steven W. Dellenback Ph.D., PMP, Robert W, Heller, Ph.D., Roger Strain, Arun Krishnamurthy

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida