Intelligent Transportation Systems — Detroit style

This week has been dominated by events in SE Michigan. First was attending the annual meeting of ITS Michigan and the second was meeting the “prime” and customer on a job we are doing at URS. Both were demanding in their own special ways.

The annual ITS meeting featured VII this year. VII is a mneumonic for “vehicle infrastructure integration” and is the beginnings of a powerful movement to add sensors and intelligence to vehicles. Great and far reaching technology will enter the vehicles and will allow vehicles to talk with each other and to other infrastructure like the internet and to roadside elements like signs, cameras, custom tailored traveller information and things we have not even imagined yet. Technically we can do this now but issues like privacy and who pays for what remain. Will this service be like a utility – water, sewer, electricity & data access? Who owns the data? What happens if a vehicle crashes because of a failure of this technology? All these issues need to be resolved in the next decade!

I am engineering some elements on a pretty cool project involving the Detroit Automatic Traffic Management System. This system covers over 180 miles of freeway around the Detroit Metro area. Tonnes of data go to the MITS center every day that describe the traffic flow and times to traverse a given segment. Also video data goes to this center and messages to the 60+ signs around the city go out. All this activity has a purpose – To allow more traffic to utilize the roadway than it was designed to use. Roads take decades to fund and build and then lots of $ to maintain. Technology that allows more vehicles to use the roadway only takes years to deploy and less $ to maintain. ITS is here to stay – INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS that is.

Thanks for reading my blog and rantings! BFN…

Phoenix was a loss!

This is a first for me – the urban and downtown canyon of Phoenix was a GPS nightmare. The GPS was jumping 200′ this way then that way so I struck out on two sites. Well, one I think I could find but a geo-newby did not feel comortable looking on the second floor of a parking garage after dark. I am almost sure I could have found it since the clues were pretty good. Anyway, no caches for the city. I guess I will have to wait until retirement before doing anything in that city!

The weather was great for the show and it was 70′s in the morning and evening and high 80′s for the daytime. All sunshine and good things going on. Wow, a real nice place.

As we headed out of twon on the I-10 Westward it was 95 on the vehicle temperature guage but it was a real dry heat(:-).