Some real ITS

We attended ITS America’s Demo ’99 in East Liberty OH. It couldn’t have been more different from the famous Demo ’97 in San Diego. The 1997 event generated huge media coverage including the most absurd press hype about how automated highways with hands-off/feet-off driving would be “crisscrossing America by 2000.” In deliverance of poetic justice for the overblown Demo 97 the USDOT was quietly pulling the plug on the flagship program there, the Automated Highway System consortium. Demo ’99 was a smaller, low-key affair, but more impressive in substance.

The big truck manufacturers are all coming out with superb driver assistance technologies:

• adaptive cruise control that you can set to follow the vehicle ahead at a specified minimum distance

• lane departure warnings that can combat drowsiness and run off the road accidents

• obstacle and collision warning radars

There are some new much higher frequency transponders coming out of defense that will pick up signage before or after you can see it and show it on a display, and do many other things beside. There is automatic lane keeping and “instrument driving” for specialized vehicles. Northern California’s Donner Pass snows famous for trapping scores of settlers heading west in 1846 is now plowed on I-80 by a lead snowplow that follows magnet nail markers allowing snow-clearance to continue at fullspeed in white-out blizzard conditions. There are now a host of guidance technologies that allow rubber tired vehicles to be provided with all the control that flanged-wheel-on-rail provides without their extra expense and inflexibility. PATH of UC Berkeley for example showed a car that follows in-pavement magnets and is able to pull into a curb repeatedly with 5mm clearance every time. No need for clumsy wheelchair lifts. Buses can now be given the train’s direct walk-on/walk-off characterstic at a platform. Much of this stuff is not expensive either.