V2I transportation bill gains ITS America as ally

U.S. Rep. Candice Miller’s (R-MI) pending legislation, which authorizes the use of existing surface-transportation funds to make investments in cutting-edge vehicle-to-infrastructure technology for the improvement of highway safety, received more important external support on Tuesday, as the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) signed on with its full support of the bill.

In a letter to Miller, ITS America President Thomas Kerns offered the organization’s total endorsement of H.R. 910, the Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Safety Technology Investment Flexibility Act of 2015, as well as the projects the bill would help fund.

“We support this critical legislation because it will provide states with the flexibility to choose vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety technologies from select programs within the Federal-aid Highway Program to connect vehicles with our transportation infrastructure, thereby vastly improving safety while optimizing road capacity,” Kerns wrote. “As you know, V2I technology represents the future of road safety with vehicle-to-infrastructure communications devices to be embedded within or alongside roads and/or attached to bridges, traffic signals, stop signs, utility poles, etc.”

In preliminary testing of the technology, V2I already has shown several promising safety applications, including intersection collision prevention, lane-departure warning and rail-grade crossing safety systems. It also has presented how it can improve traffic flow by linking vehicles to variably timed traffic signals.

“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has determined that V2I safety technology alone could potentially address 25 percent of all crashes of all vehicle types,” Kerns said. “And at full penetration with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian-and-bicyclist communications (V2X), (it) could avoid or mitigate 80 percent of all unimpaired vehicle crashes, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives annually and reducing the nearly $1 trillion cost to our nation’s economy each year.”