PROVEN FAILURE The ITS America

PROVEN FAILURE

The ITS “awareness agenda”

Some engineers have a tendency to think that if only people are aware of how clever is their technology, then it will be embraced with enthusiasm. And if their great gadgetry isn’t being embraced they think the problem is a lack of “awareness.” Joseph Sussman an MIT engineering prof writes in the latest ITS QUARTERLY magazine that “pushing the awareness agenda” is a critical priority for implementation of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). He wants a heightened PR/lobby campaign to inform politicians and bureaucrats, businessmen and the general public of the benefits of ITS.

When he wrote that Sussman had just returned from the Automated Highway System (AHS) consortium’s Aug 97 demonstration in San Diego and he commented on the terrific success of that demo. And from everything I’ve heard he’s correct about that. It was a dazzling display of the capabilities of modern sensing, radio electronics and computing. The technology to run platoons of cars under automated control worked flawlessly. And as Sussman writes the AHS demo got great publicity. Only rare people who neither read a newspaper, nor watch a TV (the Theodore Kaczynskis of this world?) could have failed to know about AHS.

Politicians and officials by the score got to ride the AHS. And they praised it to the skies. So this is one ITS technology about which there was great awareness.

Yet what happened immediately after the San Diego demo?

USDOT, Caltrans and GM, the three major supporters of the AHS Consortium pulled the plug on it! Mostly USDOT. We broke the story here actually (TRnl#18 Aug97 p4), way ahead of everyone else. A key official in USDOT explained to us that after considerable review the department had made the strategic decision that the whole objective of AHS — hands-off/feet-off driving — was undesirable. Driver assistance Yes, but driver-replacement No. That was USDOT’s newly clarified objective, embrace of which by itself was enough to kill AHS! But there was more. The official pointed out that not a single road authority in the country showed any signs of wanting to implement AHS any time soon. How long could the taxpayer support a program that wasn’t showing any sign of getting beyond research and development, that noone wanted to deploy. The feds, he said, were moving their money into a new Intelligent Vehicle Initiative that focuses on more on safety where the new vehicle-based technologies offer real promise via incremental implementation rather than continuing to seek the congestion-relieving mirage of AHS. It was only politically viable he explained to support technologies that showed some real promise of being implemented.

So all that truly great AWARENESS achieved for AHS in San Diego, timed perfectly to influence decisions, did nothing to inhibit its rapid disappearance down the DC gurgler.

The lessons:

(1) There has to be a market for the technology, some serious prospective customers. In the case of AHS which requires investment in the roadway system, there have to be roadway owners wanting to install it in their roadway, and with the funding to do it.

(2) Governments are notoriously flighty. They’ll be hot for something one congressional session and cold on it the next. Don’t ever expect any longterm commitments from politicians, especially in R&D. Scores of large technology development projects have been started by governments and then dropped — the super-collider, the aerospace plane, maglev trains, oil-from-coal, ballistic missile defense...to mention just a few recent ones.

(3) There has to be an institutional setting in which the decisionmakers have incentives to deploy the technology.

Some ITS technologies have been highly successsful, others have been disappointments, a few pure hype. Let’s focus on successes. Electronic toll collection has been very popular with both toll patrons and operators alike and has rapidly been deployed in the past 2 to 3 years. But its future depends not at all on awareness. Everyone who matters is well aware of it. The future of electronic toll collection (ETC) is related almost entirely to how much toll collection there is. At present in the US only a few percent of highway travel is tolled. 96% or more of the potential for electronic tolling therefore depends on how many of those ‘free’ roads, currently funded out of taxes, are turned over to toll operation. So long as roads are run according to the Soviet economic model as old socialist facilities, run by state-directed and tax-funded monopolies there won’t be much of a market for fancy toll collection technologies. But if roads are brought into the modern world of the marketplace with flexible competitive pricing of roadspace by financially self-sufficient highway service providers there will be a tremendous market for ETC. The future depends almost wholly, therefore, on institutional change. Do the roads get left with the state DOTs or are they made commerical?

Manna-from-Shoosta: There’s an immediate budgetary issue too. The more fed-$s there are for roads in handouts, the less toll road development there will be. If electorates are persuaded by the Bud Shuster siren song that there’s lots of free billions floating around Washington DC that he can get for highways, there won’t be much support for new toll roads. When the issue is posed as a free road versus a toll road, the free road will win every time. So Manna-from-Shoosta is poison to the toll road well, and death to major new ETC business.

Other technology success stories are incident management, signal coordination improvement, and motorway ramp metering. Again the extent of deployment depends not at all on awareness. It is obvious these things work. Studies show repeatedly they can increase the efficiency with which road space is used, reduce delays, improve travel time, improve safety and punctuality etc. Great stuff. The problem is the institutional setting. The present operators of the roads do not have an incentive to deploy these technologies on more than a token basis, because their sources of funding do not enable them to capture economic value from the bettter service the technologies could enable them to offer.

A business style operator of roads will install productive equipment when he can capture the benefits of that equipment in extra revenue and when the extra revenue exceeds the annualized costs he incurs buying and operating the equipment. In addition the potential profit from deployment enables the business style operator to finance the systems in the capital markets.

A city traffic department by contrast gets not a cent extra revenue from improving traffic flow on its arterial corridors through signal optimization, nor does a state DOT from running a motorway more smoothly through breaking up ramp platoons with meters, or clearing incidents promptly. On the contrary, the worse their traffic is the larger their politically determined budgets are likely to be. Government budgets are larger, the more people are unhappy with the level of service. So state-providers actually threaten their own budgets when they find ways of improving utilization of an existing facility. Now of course they’ll do some of this hightech stuff, because they have to show they are with-it and because there are always a few odd heroes who will fight to do what is right. But when the whole institution lacks the positive incentives and the right funding, the ITS implementation will remain token stuff. Gestures, not serious business.

Only if there is tolling or road pricing and some of the benefits of ITS can be captured in higher road user charges will ITS be seriously deployed.

These are tough political/philosophical/economic issues. Vested interests in the state agencies have to be dealt with. Feelgood awareness fluff won’t alter anything.

To pose it in these terms is to be a soft touch for the services of Washington’s PR people and lobbyists. It is a cop-out from serious political work. To the extent this “awareness” is seriously proposed as the answer, it shows a very naive understanding of the way the world works.